Opinion from CEO Alan Leaman

Labour is apparently planning a big announcement on civil service reform, abolition of quangos and merging a lot of back office functions. There is talk of a new culture of ‘smarter government’ and a big place for bringing together all the agencies that deliver local services and making sure they are working most effectively together.

 

Philip Hammond for the Conservatives has now countered with an important speech. His argument is that the taxpayer would now be £60bn better off each year if public sector productivity had improved over the last decade at the same rate  as in the private sector. To help him realise those gains, he is setting up a Public Services Productivity Advisory Board.

 

The parties are starting to accept the scale of the mountain that the public sector needs to climb. Both are right to emphasise the importance of efficiency and productivity – even though the conventional wisdom says that efforts to improve either are doomed to disappoint. The really interesting stuff is how much further they are prepared to go, particularly in advance of the election, to discuss which functions of government can be dropped, and how radically we could change the way in which the public sector does its business.

 

Management consultants, of course, have a lot to offer here. This is a tough agenda of change; none of these ideas are easy. Politicians of both parties know this too – they tell me so. If we create the right climate about how the public sector uses consultancy, here is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for consultancy to prove its worth and for our politicians to deliver a major change.