Stephen Hughes, Chief Executive of Birmingham City Council, has 
written about the spending challenges that local authorities face after the publication of a survey by the Local Government Chronicle, which revealed that councillors are more optimistic than senior officers over budget reductions and the impact on services that will follow. Here is the full, unabridged version of his submission to the LGC, which appeared last week (September 30)…
We all know that the cuts are coming. There is no lack of analysis of the scale of the reductions that face local government over the next four years.
In my mind they are unprecedented, certainly in my time serving local government. We are all struggling to answer the question – how can we continue to protect the public with up to a third less resources?
But I have felt for sometime now that we will not successfully answer that question before we deal with the “perception gap”.
Officers and Members alike have the figures in front of them and intellectually understand it’s a massive problem.
But too many of us, and I probably include myself, just don’t quite believe it. In consequence, while we are talking the right game, our behaviours don’t reflect the new reality.
The survey carried out by LGC demonstrates some of that. The key finding is that generally elected Members are more optimistic than Officers about protecting corporate priorities.
This may just reflect the fact that Officers have been working for longer on finding solutions and are beginning to realise the scale of the problem. But I even think the Officer scores seem optimistic.
So, we are talking about how we can take advantage of initiatives such as shared services, community based budgets, the Big Society, more services provided directly by the community, application of lean, business transformation and the rest.
Some authorities have even done some of this to a lesser or greater extent. But it still feels very conceptual, without workable solutions to the rapid cultural change needed within and between public sector organisations to create the energy and focus needed to implement them fast enough to avoid damaging cuts.
It’s clear to me that the scale of savings required cannot be achieved by cheaper purchasing, reduction in overheads and more efficient processing. There’s just not enough cost in the back office to deliver the goods.
We do need a clear definition of the outcomes we are seeking to achieve, so we can concentrate production on the most effective outputs and stop doing some things. There needs to be a radical redesign of local government’s service structure in consequence.
My key task at present is to persuade decision makers – councillors – that this is real and that we have a job to persuade the public change like this is needed.
They will need to be behind the drive to make this happen, because without political leadership from all councillors it will be very difficult to overcome professional and cultural barriers to change.
If we can begin to believe that huge radical change is needed, then we will change our approach.
We will look at the immediate demands in front of us in a different way and not seek to solve them in the traditional ways.
We may get used to the fact that the state is not going to be able to provide all the answers to all peoples’ needs, and that others will have to take up the challenge.
And, finally, perhaps we can learn not to feel guilty that we can’t continue to do in the future what we’ve done in the past.
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