Back offices targeted as government sets up local government efficiency task force

The move towards shared services and leaner back offices in local authorities gained further momentum this week after the Department for Communities and Local Government set up a local government task force designed to drive value for money efficiencies and protect frontline services.

The task force will be chaired by Steve Bullock, Mayor of Lewisham, and Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council, and its membership drawn from representatives of local government and unions. It has been charged with seeing whether savings similar to the planned 20% cut in the cost of the senior civil service can be achieved.

The scope for local authority management restructuring – including an increase in the number of shared chief executives (there are currently ten, with claimed savings of £85,000 per council) – is one of the principal areas that the task force will address. The others include:

• How sharing services with other authorities and public sector bodies can deliver efficiency savings. “If 60% of districts shared financial services and cut costs by 20%, annual savings could exceed £20m,” the DCLG claimed;
• How to reduce the impact of senior pay through transparency and affordable pay benchmarks;
• How to free-up and motivate staff to drive forward more innovative frontline services;
• How to reduce overlap and duplication of work in between district and county councils in two-tier areas; and
• How to improve capacity and innovate to meet citizens’ needs, including benchmarking back offices and non-essential bureaucratic positions.

The launch of the task force, which will report next month, follows the government’s publication of Putting the Frontline First and the Pre-Budget Report.

Communities Secretary John Denham said: “Woe betide the local authority which cuts frontline services when it hasn’t made every possible efficiency savings. Local taxpayers should be vigilant if they are asked to accept reduced services because their council won’t take tough decisions to introduced shared services, sharing senior staff with other local authorities.”

Lewisham’s Bullock added: “Local government has delivered significant efficiency savings while driving up performance but now faces a fresh challenge to deliver even more for our communities while making cost savings of significantly different order. This will only be possible if we take a clear, unsentimental and above all speedy look at what we do, how we do it and how we might do it differently in the future.”