Andrew has spoken about the Business Plan; the cost pressures we face, particularly with a need to protect the most vulnerable in our society, the savings we need to deliver from people or staff, procurement, our lean systems work; the investment that members wish to make in improving some of our services. So what does this mean for DOR – a mix of front line and support services?
The financial settlement for Wiltshire is not yet published – we’re expecting that late this year – so what follows is my best assessment as to what will happen.
In terms of cost reduction, I am planning on delivering real cash savings back to the business of at least 12% in 11-12 – that’s the next financial year. This will be tough to deliver but is vital to balance out budget next year. You’ll remember that we are legally obliged to balance our budget.
Now we do essentially two things with all of our money; we pay our staff and we buy goods and services. These two categories of spend will be impacted about equally. What this means is that we will be getting smaller – as an organisation and as a team in terms of numbers of staff employed and the services which we deliver.
Because we moved to unitary status, I have no doubt that we are in a better place than other organisations facing this challenge. This fact doesn’t make the task easier though – it’s still tough to do, as evidenced by the 560 managers we put at risk last week, including 90 from our team here today. Last week was one of the most difficult of my career but the professionalism and dignity of all those involved was incredible; reassuring and inspiring.
Because this is tough, it would be easy for us all to become trapped in a spiral of fear, worry, and anxiety about our individual situations. In my experience, from both the private and the public sector, those organisations that remain “stuck” in this place are going to be in big trouble. They become increasing more irrelevant as the world moves on around them – whilst they focus on themselves. We are not going to become irrelevant!
We have to remain focused on the future, the opportunities that it presents and above all on our customers – the people of Wiltshire, represented by their elected members. So what about that future then?
In DOR, we have and continue to invest heavily to improve our services; making them better performing at lower cost. These investments include; work place transformation, new work-anywhere ICT (both beautifully demonstrated when I was in Bourne Hill last week by the teams moving into that building), the Business Management Programme – SAP, our national-leading work on lean systems thinking, our transition to unitary and our work with communities and Area Boards. Our ability to deliver major change programmes on time, on quality and on cost is giving us a deserved national reputation.
All of this work gives us a solid base on which to continue to build a strong future; and our mission will be to exploit this investment to maximise our performance to our customers whilst occupying a smaller financial foot print. So what might this mean specifically?
- Communication and public engagement: I am astounded by the development of social networking and we must seize this opportunity to use it for community engagement; both the communities we serve and the internal communities and teams we work in.
This is ably demonstrated by one local government organisation I know where their citizens are writing Wiki-plans – a role normally performed my professionals within the organisation. This shows the power of social networking and how it can be harnessed to deliver better community engagement. You can do the same thing internally too.
- Major rationalisation of ICT applications and infrastructure
- Exploit the new technology of cloud computing – particularly important in an dispersed geographical area like Wiltshire
- We’re deploying a new revenues and benefits system; serving customers in the home; instant decisions and enabling a redesign of that team around the customer using lean techniques
- New, more relevant ways of assessing and measuring our performance
- New ways to deliver democratic renewal
Some councillors are struggling to balance their professional work with their work as an elected member; this is reducing the pool of people who wish to put themselves forward for election. We need to address this.
We need to develop and exploit our On-line capability, self service for external and internal services with fast, reliable decisions – both external customers and internal customers:
- The web as the Customer access channel of choice for most high volume, low value services
The same thing for our internal customers, especially around HR and Finance
Financial management information down to community area, by service to facilitate Big Society with sound information to enable people to become more engaged in what’s happening on their patch
- We will need to do this for the 4 test bed Area Boards as we take these to the next stage. This will mean a fundamentally different role for Finance professionals
Continuing to drive out efficiencies from our transactional services and exploring how we could share these with others; the voluntary sector, other local public bodies, other local authorities; the private sector.
- We have just started to share vehicle maintenance facilities with Fire & Rescue and I am meeting Andy Goves, the Chief Fire Officer tomorrow to start further work on sharing other support services.
It’s our job to translate this vision into reality; to identify how we will achieve it; to resolve the inevitable conflicts; to deliver for our customers; to innovate; to imagine something else – a better way to work; to make local government relevant to today’s society and the issues it faces. We must set the agenda for the future and deliver it, not live in the past celebrating worthy, but old achievements.
This is all of our jobs. Please discuss this in your teams and work out how your team will contribute to the agenda, and how you individually will contribute. In a smaller organisation, innovation and contribution are going to be the key differentiators between leaders and followers. I want Wiltshire Council and this team to be leading!
Thanks for reading and speak again next week.
Carlton
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