A stark new reality

Last week, Chancellor George Osborne delivered his much anticipated emergency budget. Where does this leave already pressured public services and what can be done to mitigate its impact?

Since the Budget, the internet, and the media in general, has been awash with discussion of what has widely been acknowledged as the most brutal budget in modern times - a 77% of total consolidation of debt to be achieved through spending reductions and 23% through tax increases and public sector net borrowing falling from £149bn this year to £20bn in 2015/16. Jonathan Baume, general secretary of the First Division Association described the measures announced in the emergency Budget as "savage", adding, "There has not been anything on this scale since the 1920s."

There's a stark new reality here that's gone from speculation to governmental action and without doubt such swingeing cuts will have a huge impact on the already stressed delivery of frontline public services. And crucially for those local government employers and managers tasked with managing the changes there will be extra burdens in the form of widespread redundancies and an increasingly demoralised workforce facing a two-year pay freeze.

If we add to that October's comprehensive spending review which is due to take a large axe to departmental budgets in the three years from 2011/12 and it will be even clearer that employers and managers will need to find ever more ways to make smaller budgets and fewer staff stretch further and work harder.

Anna Turley, acting director of the New Local Government Network said recently, "The scale of the cuts poses a serious challenge to councils' ability to deliver services that meet the expectations of citizens over the coming five years and beyond. This budget creates a burning platform for our local public services. They must be radically re-engineered in order to meet these savings without jeopardising front-line services."

There had been much talk, pre-budget, of the Total Place initiative but there are now fears, as this didn't make it into the Budget, that such a wide ranging co-ordination of local government savings and efficiency drives may now be difficult to move forward. Therefore the focus in the near future will be on how organisations can start to act internally to meet the requirements of their new budgetary realities - and in areas like health and human services the spotlight is really starting to fall on smart IT solutions that enable local government to effectively get to grips with information management in order to maintain service levels on diminished budgets.

Socitm noted recently on their website that, "Information management is ill-understood and poorly managed by public sector organisations, yet holds the potential to protect them from the worst consequences of the current financial crisis." Certainly we're finding that solutions such as Consilium's own TotalMobile mobile working system are well placed to help make significant inroads into required cost savings, by creating the potential for sizeable efficiency savings in areas such as public housing, public works, asset management and a wide range of social services applications - and in some cases providing rapid productivity increases of up to 40%.

Some commentators have noted that the Budget presents as many opportunities as it does problems for local government service provision, and perhaps it's time to start looking at carefully targeted IT and easily-deployable on-the-ground solutions as the most immediate and effective way of addressing many of them.

www.totalmobile.co.uk