Insight
A Faer Point: Mind the Gap
The commentary in recent weeks on securing significant cost savings to help fill the reported £20 billion in the public finances has brought familiar rhetoric around cutting back on the use of consultants.
As a humble contractor supporting public sector organisations to find short term leadership capability and specialist skills needed to improve performance or deliver complex transformational change, I do wonder at the feasibility of achieving this purely as a cost saving measure.
Previous attempts to wean public sector organisations off “consultants” have met with mixed results as the fact remains that the specialist skills and leadership capacity needed to deliver complex transformational change in the public sector is in short supply. Equally an increasing number of local authorities we work with would not be able to function without the introduction of short-term specialist skills and experience particularly in areas such as social care and housing. This is exacerbated by the fact that many in local government leadership positions are coming close to retirement and this demographic timebomb will not be solved quickly. You can’t then suddenly switch off access to short term resourcing solutions in these areas without serious consequences.
Thankfully, the rhetoric this time is not one of austerity but trying to find a measured approach. The chancellor has also confirmed measures such as lifting civil service headcount cap, to help departments make value for money decisions about how to resource work and introducing much needed pay rises in education and health all of which will help skills and resourcing pressures in the longer term.
Hopefully, we will have a mature debate going forward about the use of interim managers and consultants based on the value they bring rather than just the cost. The danger otherwise is that a yawning gap will appear in the labour market that could bring a greater cost in terms of its impact on the quality of service delivery and efficiency.
Jason Wheatley is a Partner at Faerfield Limited.
Originally published in the Municipal Journal, 8 August 2024.
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