I still find it ironic that the public sector is cast as the ‘wicked witch’ with its large deficit and salaries (allegedly) increasing faster than those of the private sector.  But it wasn’t the public sector that was in the casino gambling on unquantifiable derivatives and creating false value!  It wasn’t the public sector that was lending money to people who could never meet the repayments and who then sold these loans on three or four times on the pretence that they were worth billions!  But it was the state that bailed out the banks and it was the state that put hundreds of millions back into the economy through quantitative easing to enable capital to be lent to businesses and to stimulate the economy.

But none of this means much when you are faced with significant budget reduction and you already have spent many years ‘salami-slicing’ to prevent service cuts that impact people who really do need services.  And it will be those councils who are brave and will make decisions that are ‘out of the box’ that are likely to best serve local people – but it will not be easy and it will not be without a lot of soul searching and facing up to public criticism.  And I raise a glass to every councillor in the land for they will need all the support possible over the forthcoming years as they will be making decisions that most did not enter public service to make!

It is a precarious business running multi-million pound organisations with political leadership yet being accountable to your local communities all of whom have, quite rightly, huge expectations.  And doing this through the complexity that the partnership arrangements, LAA targets and CAA expectations bring just adds to that challenge.

We know from our work with local authorities that skills for downsizing are going to be much in demand over these next five years or more and managers will experience huge challenges in delivering excellence as the cuts in public expenditure start to dig deep – and deep they will be.  LCS is in a good position to support organisations through these difficult times and our partnership with CorVu, one of the leading performance management software houses, provides the opportunity to stay focused on delivering performance improvement at a time of even more change.

For smaller consultancies such as LCS, committed as we are to public service, it is challenging to add value whilst not being seen to be taking away the jobs of public sector workers. It is a balance we think we achieve, but one which is never assured!

For those who have been our clients for some years, welcome to our new web site! For those on this site for the first time we hope you find it interesting and do get in touch if you think our public sector experience and skills could support you in change and improvement.