LCS Consultancy Services » Maggie

What’s in Store for 2012?

Maggie — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:16:46 +0000

The New Year starts with the Prime Minister warning of “worse to come” with respect to the UK economy. For those who work with and for public sector organisations we know ‘how bad it is’ and we know we are nowhere near the bottom of the public sector consultancy economic cycle! Times have been hard and they are going to be even harder over the next 2/3 years but, as with most small consultancy practices, we can be flexible and we can respond to the market a lot quicker than the ’bigger players’ – and we think we have managed to do this over the past 2 years.

We have moved in two directions. Firstly by developing new partnerships and building on existing partnership arrangements. So, for example, we have joined with Insight Management Solutions and won the contract for the three strands of a National Skills Academy programme to provide management training to 24 graduate trainees who are moving into Adult Social Care. We are also very positive about linking with an internationally renowned UK business – one of the largest of its kind in the world – to provide specialist support in Regulatory Services reform. We hope to have this relationship confirmed early in 2012 and we are very positive about future prospects.

Our second direction has been to look outside the UK – and we are currently working with a Swedish organisation that specialises in public sector consultancy – on a project that supports the decentralisation of powers from central to local government in Albania. This began in September 2011 and continues into the New Year when this first phase will be complete. Tirana is not quite like London or Cardiff and Albanian local government is not quite like our own – but it has the same group of dedicated public sector workers seeking solutions to improve public sector services even if they are very underdeveloped when compared to Western Europe.

And looking ahead, we believe it is only through being open to working in partnerships that new opportunities will open in a very difficult climate. The implications of the Health and Social Care Bill – that should be enacted in early Spring – should provide specialist organisations like our own – with considerable experience in the sector and on the interface with Health – with quite a lot of work, yet if it continues the way the changes have happened over the past 6 months then it is likely to be the large consultancies on framework agreements that will be called upon to provide the support that is much needed. Despite all the rhetoric, the SME’s in this world really don’t operate on a ‘level playing field’ with the larger practices with all their links into the central and local government people that matter on procurement decisions.

Nonetheless, as we look toward the New Year – and the years that follow – we do so with trepidation as colleagues in the public sector consultancy business and our colleagues employed in the state sector start to experience serious anxieties about work and income for the first time. The health cost of anxieties of such proportions are untold – and unmeasured – but as the Christmas and New Year festivities come to an end – and the return to reality starts to hit – we will recall all those conversations over the past 2 weeks about “where the next contract is going to be found” or “how severe the next round of cuts is going” to be for those in employment. It is a sad place to be right now and whilst the noises come from those in power about recognising this issue, I wonder if they have any real understanding what it is currently like for the majority of the working population right now?

Health as We Know it? Or will it be?

Maggie — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:53:59 +0000

It’s back to the Committee stages with the scrutiny of 160 government-inspired amendments to the original Health and Social Care Bill. But will it make any difference? I think it will, even if it is not possible to be certain exactly what some of the amendments mean or what might emerge out of this scrutiny phase before it returns to its Report Stage and its Third Reading in September.
There is a lot on which to speculate – and more on this to follow – but let’s take just one example for which clarification is going to be required. The Future Forum recommended that commissioning groups will have the same boundaries as the local authorities but does this mean (as seems to be the interpretation by the local government community) that each upper tier will have a single “clinical commissioning group” (CCG) or does it mean, as Health bodies seem to think, that where the current pathfinder consortia exist (and in many areas thare are more than one per local authority area) the status quo will remain?
So, is coterminosity a common border (hence one commissioning group) or is it simply not crossing local authority borders thus allowing for many CCGs per authority? Watch this space as this is challenged and explored between now and the 14 July (when the Committee stage ends). Mick Lowe

Budget June 2010

Maggie — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:52:43 +0000

Ouch! Well, here it is and, in many respects, no surprises. And despite the fact we knew it was coming it still comes as quite a shock – and so it should. Without being apocalyptic, it really could see the end of the state as we know it. The private sector takes us to the brink of collapse and the solution is – more of the private sector! The public sector bails us out and what do we get – less of the public sector with fewer resources to monitor, control and regulate an economic system that is prone to distortion! And far less of a public sector that protects the most vulnerable.

I referenced, in an earlier blog, that the life of a councillor would be even tougher from 2010 because who wants to get elected to just spend all their time deciding what is the least-worse place to cut expenditure. Well, that ‘least-worse’ place has just got more difficult to find, with a real cut of 25% over the next four years.

This isn’t deliverable by yet more salami slicing; yet more shared services; yet more efficiency gains; yet more privatisation; yet more ‘creative thinking’. All these may help, at the margins, but it really is the cessation of services as we know them. And all the baloney about cuts being reduced if “….we can find any additional savings to social security and welfare beyond those which I will shortly outline, then that will greatly relieve the pressure on these departments and that 25% figure.”, as the Chancellor stated yesterday, is simply hot air since where will more than half a million people made redundant or retiring early from front line public services receive any income? With a large proportion of public sector budgets buying private sector services where will all those made redundant as a consequence of cuts on this scale receive any income? From social security and welfare! Like others, my biggest fear is that the recession that this will create will increase the transfer payments and feed into that further spiral of decline.

The implications for all of us who are stakeholders in public services are serious – very serious. Organisations will require support and consultancy (even if seems morally challenging to engage external organisations to help minimise the impact on services users) and smaller consultancies (such as ours) must be in a position to offer value for money in what will be an equally difficult period ahead. Fees will come down – they already have – and there will be many more consultants looking for work. But in this period of austerity, fast moving, low cost, high value consultancies have to be the first choice if support is required and we will continue to offer such services throughout this period.

Mick