Top 10 Issues - Public Sector

Regularly one of the issues will be developed in a more detailed article

1. The Efficiency Review. Sir Peter Gershon's review of public spending was avidly adopted by a government seeking to improve public services without further increasing expenditure. All public sector organisations are striving to meet efficiency targets by better procurement, better labour efficiency, redesigning transactional services and reorganising the back office.



2. Capacity Building. Studies of public sector organisations have frequently pointed to lack of capacity in key business areas such as project management, strategic people management and marketing.



3. Performance Improvement. Most public services have experienced attempts to emulate market rigour with independent performance ratings. These 'star' ratings have been increasingly important in driving improvement in health, education and local government.



4. Regeneration figures in much public sector activity in the inner city. The most recent example being the 2012 Olympics. It can involve, education and training, property development, economic development, community development, environmental improvement and much more. The focus is the local area and the key is partnership.



5. Service reorganisation involves changes in structure for example, in health, fire, the police, and local government; refocusing services on the service user e.g. children; and remodelling the workforce. This has required extensive use of TUPE staff transfer programmes.



6. Bringing in private sector expertise and resources has resulted in various initiatives such as the PFI initiative and the drive to draw the private sector into providing health facilities.



7. Information technology is the key to improvement and efficiency gains in many public services. But, the public sector has a doubtful record of benefits realisation in this field.



8. Innovation, how to initiate and evaluate innovation and then roll out success stories across the sector as a whole.



9. Equal pay is proving a difficult issue across the public sector. This is because pay and rewards systems are often outmoded particularly with respect to decayed performance bonus schemes usually only available to predominately male workgroups. New single status reward structures are being put in place in both local government and health backed by extensive use of evaluation



10. Engaging the public to create a real stakeholder relationship is a major challenge for the local public services such as Health and Local Government. This can involve marketing, market research and a range of initiatives to encourage direct public involvement.

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