It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if council budgets keep getting reduced, quality and customer satisfaction will suffer.
Whether it was due to managing public expectations, maximising efficiencies or reducing services in ways that were least visible initially, there seems to have been a lag between budget cuts and their full impact on residents’ satisfaction levels. But latest indications are that we are starting to see an inevitable downturn in customer satisfaction as austerity well and truly bites.
The Association for Public Service Excellence’s (APSE) performance network (PN), which benchmarks and analyses information from authorities all over the UK, is now in its 16th year.
An examination of latest indicators shows how local government frontline performance is faring in the light of harsh budget cuts. Information on costs, productivity, quality and customer satisfaction can provide insights into where a specific service is at, where it is going and, importantly, how to get there. In the current financial climate, benchmarking can also help councils learn from each other and make decisions based on the results of interventions made elsewhere.
So, looking at PN data for 2013-14, what overall trends are revealed? Having compared latest data with the 2008-9 period, the first thing that stands out is the overall reduction in costs and increase in productivity across all frontline activities.
Expenditure on parks has been reduced by 20%, for example, on refuse collection by 24% and street cleansing expenditure is down by 11%. This is linked to a reduction in staffing, and there has been a 3% reduction in frontline staff in parks. There has also been a reduction in total staff of 1% in refuse, 13% in street cleansing and 21% in transport. Reductions in personnel have been accompanied by reductions in overall costs; for example, building cleaning has seen a 24% reduction in staff and 16% reduction in overall expenditure.
Evidence of productivity improvements can be seen, to use just one of many examples, in Bridgend CBC building cleaning, where square meters cleaned per hour in primary schools is up by 54%, secondary schools by 39% and offices by 22% as a result of reviewing systems and using new equipment. This means staff are working harder than ever and costs have been contained or reduced.
Councils across the land are also going all out to maximise efficiency. As well as our annual awards for performance management and improvement, APSE’s performance networks conference in December featured numerous examples of efficiency measures. Just a selection of these include: Hull City Council’s refuse service using route optimisation, four day working week and in-cab technology; Knowsley MBC conducting a time and motion review, introducing multi-skilled working and generating new income from commercial contracts in parks services; and Gateshead MBC using branding, investment in equipment, staff training and customer feedback on education catering.
However, despite all these efforts on the part of local authorities to maintain services with few and fewer resources, customer satisfaction, which had grown steadily over a decade and was maintained in the immediate wake of the cuts, started to fall last year for the first time. Street cleansing is one example of a service that has seen year on year improvements, but saw customer satisfaction in 2014 drop below 2010 levels, down to 69%.
APSE’s figures are reflected by those of opinion poll company ComRes, which has warned of further deterioration in public satisfaction given the further cuts to come, which would have a more immediate impact on service delivery. There are also signs that quality is being affected by the cuts. PN applies relevant quality indicators to each service and this shows, for example, a 29% reduction in quality in refuse, 20% in street cleansing and 3% in parks.
We are all only too aware that local authorities have experienced a high volume of job losses and data shows they have managed to contain or reduce their costs and are stretching efficiency as far as possible. Managers across a range of services that are part of PN expect budgets to get even tighter over the next five years.
This therefore begs the question of whether a tipping point has been reached? Is there anything else councils can do within such constrained finances – or have efficiencies reached their limit?
There is always scope for learning from what efficiency measures other authorities have taken. But where every possible efficiency angle has been considered, councils are also looking at ways of reducing demand and generating income.
Common demand reduction measures include education and enforcement in street cleansing and waste minimisation in refuse collection. Common income generation measures include cleaning private sector buildings, holding concerts and events in parks and taxi testing by transport service teams.
However, with the best will in the world, there is only so much councils can cut without decisions having to be made about what services can be reduced further. The theme of the annual PN conference this year was ‘Information is Power’ and, while obviously not a panacea in such difficult times, speakers discussed how effective use of performance information can help authorities learn from each other and to help make tough decisions.
Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy president, Mike Owen, director of resources at Bury MBC, discussed how benchmarking data can help future spending forecasts as well as assessing cost and productivity, with performance information being able to support good decisions. Benchmarking gives services independent data against which to assess and quantify interventions made by other authorities in similar situations from around the country.
Understanding performance information is important when facing difficult dilemmas and deciding priorities. As Colin Everett, chief executive of Flintshire CC, told the PN conference, leadership in local government must be informed by evidence. Local politicians need to justify how every penny is spent and, in these hard times, hard facts don’t necessarily make budget cuts less painful, but they at least enable councils to make those tough choices transparent to their local communities.
Paul O’Brien is chief executive and Debbie Johns is head of performance networks at APSE