Efficiency and service improvement - two sides of the same coin

Welcoming the new White Paper, ‘Strong and Prosperous Communities', Sykes is “pleased to see the support given to what is already happening around the Regional Centres of Excellence and the moving closer together with regional improvement partnerships”.

This is a good idea, he says, “because efficiency and service improvement are two sides of the same coin”.

Sykes is positive about the White Paper, particularly about the chapter on efficiency and transforming local services (Chapter 7) and the references to business process improvement. A number of the Centres of Excellence are working at creating capacity on this front. “This is something that I think will gain favour in the local government community as they know that in order to achieve expected efficiency gains they really do need to look at business process improvement.

“Bigger authorities either have the capacity in house or can buy it in, but smaller authorities can find it difficult to create such capacity, so support – and sharing of best practice - from the Centres of Excellence will be important.

Sykes is also enthusiastic about the idea of cross boundary work. “I feel very strongly that if you look to the future some of the big gains are going to come from working across boundaries between agencies - and one of the things in the White Paper is this idea that there should be an agreement with the agencies in the area about transformation and efficiency work.”

Sykes own authority, Worcestershire, has been successfully working on a Third Age Services project involving the county, the districts and the DWP. “This has been hugely successful in reducing the amount of duplication there is in doing the financial assessments for older people,” he says. “It's a win for everybody.”

“It is that kind of cross boundary working that can be very important,” adds Sykes. “The more we get in to that the more we realise the opportunities we have been missing before when we were working in our silos.

“Up until now, when we talk about shared services that sharing is within the local government community. But I think that the real opportunities will come from sharing across the agency boundaries.”

And Sykes is looking at sharing at the fundamental level - of assets and buildings. “I don't think we've done enough in terms of looking at opportunities for using buildings more wisely than we do at the moment. For example, if you think of Worcestershire we've got a very big estate, the health service has got a very big estate, the police have got a very big estate – could we make better use of those public buildings across the public sector?”

Sykes also believes that local government should be focusing on the customer experience – it should be thinking about what the front office look like across public services.

He quotes Worcestershire's one-stop shop in Evesham, which provides a front office not just for the county but also for the districts, the police, for the DWP and for the voluntary organisations.

Says Sykes, “Customers know that they can go in there and that we will help them with the labyrinth that is local government. It is that kind of focus on the customer – looking across the agencies – that will become more and more important.

“And that joined up front office then give you a platform for doing more on efficiencies and sharing in the back office.”

Technology, he says, is the enabler here – it supports the vision. And local government should make more use of the technology it already has. He quotes the example of an application rolled out recently by Worcester when they realised that there was capacity in the system to do more at no cost.

According to Sykes, the future of local gov is about place shaping – about creating a sense of place and leading the community to make that place better. The best way to do that, he says, is by working with other agencies so that public service is coherent and efficient.