Adopting technologies to increase staff productivity could be the saving grace of local government as it ramps up to achieve the savings outlined in the treasury-backed Gershon Review. On average more than half of councils believe that this is amongst the top three success factors to local authorities achieving efficiency gains of at least £6.5 billion by 2007-2008 mandated under Gershon. The other success factors were having people with the right skills and restructuring public services to reduce costs.
With individual councils expected to achieve 2.5% per annum savings the onus is on local authorities to boost internal efficiency while running better services. Remote working technology was highlighted by the Telewest Business study as a key driver for meeting efficiency gains.
The major benefits of remote working were found to be increasing staff productivity (65 per cent of respondents), increasing staff retention (65 per cent), reducing council overheads such as office space (64 per cent) and making it easier to recruit people with the right skills (52 per cent).
“Local council priorities have shifted to the next wave of e-government with Gershon, from getting public services online to waking up to how efficiency gains can be made across the entire organisation,” said Christopher Small, Director of Public Sector at Telewest Business.
“Our survey found that 65 per cent of local councils are feeling under increasing pressure to reduce office space in the next few years. When you couple this with the pressure to increase staff productivity and find people with the right skills, embracing new communications technologies could be the key to making sure councils gain greater efficiencies without cutting staff or public services.”
93 per cent of council officials suggested that it is a challenge to find people with the right skills and half of those felt that this situation was becoming increasingly difficult signalling the risk of a skills crisis in the public sector, which could be averted through embracing remote working.
Despite these results the extent to which councils are currently deploying remote working to achieve efficiency gains was found to be limited. Almost half of the respondents said that their council did not have a remote working policy in place for more than 10 per cent of staff. However, one in five councils did have a policy in place for a limited number of staff implying that they are running pilots to see if remote working is a viable solution. A further 14 per cent of respondents did not have systems in place to support remote working. These findings are alarming given that remote working is also at the forefront of a strategic agenda for the public sector, as it takes a lead on the government’s Flexible Working Regulations 2002, which came into force last year.
Other findings of the research included:
- Almost three quarters of local councils are on track to make the efficiency gains as prescribed by the Gershon Review
- 61 per cent of respondents suggested efficiency gains cannot be made without impacting the service to the public and one in four respondents felt that it was impossible to meet targets without impacting council tax
- A lack of guidance from Central Government on how to realise targets was also spotlighted by the study with 64 per cent of councils feeling their way in the dark on how to meet efficiency gains
- 65 per cent of local councils polled said they were coming under increasing pressure to reduce office space. There were three main reasons cited for this pressure: reducing costs, increased adoption of technologies that enable home working and the restructuring of public services
Autor: Rebecca Tyrer
Quelle: SourceWire, 15.11.2005
