IT’S TIME for the public sector to stop ticking boxes and start lifting weights: it has to reassert its authority if the United Kingdom is to keep improving.
A new report from Ernst & Young argues that the sector’s ability to act as an “intelligent client” has been diluted and that it’s lagging behind the private sector when it comes to “procurement in the broadest sense of defining strategy, shaping solutions . . . and driving delivery through to improved outcomes”.
Outsourcing is at least partly to blame, it argues. “Too much is abdicated to suppliers, or ‘strategic partners’, all too often ending in tears and recrimination.” Reversing this trend will become urgent as service commissioning takes on a more central role.
“It is essential for the public sector to reassert its authority. It must be clear about what it needs and ensure that it gets it . . . Private-sector advisers have an important role to play here by transferring scarce skills to their public-sector clients — in effect making themselves redundant — particularly in areas that are new. For example, few public managers have experience of implementing mergers, converting to shared services or managing joint ventures . . . any organisation that has to deliver services day-to-day at the same time as implementing major change will require external support and advice. The key is using it to learn rather than simply to deliver a programme.”
The report is largely positive about what has been achieved so far in the battle for improved productivity. “Overall it is clear that much activity and effort is going into making and measuring efficiency improvements and reporting them more accurately than before,” it says.