The first round of efficiency savings was easy enough, but further progress will be tough. Julie Evans describes what Merton LBC is doing to maintain the momentum When Sir Peter Gershon unveiled his efficiency targets for local government, most councils were fairly confident that year one savings wouldn’t present too many problems. Poorer services and known inefficiencies would be a good starting point. But year two onwards was a different matter. Genuine value for money savings – as opposed to cuts – would get progressively harder to find. Now, Merton LBC looks to have gone some way to solve the problem with a toolkit for managers, developed with the help of accountancy giant PricewaterhouseCoopers. The toolkit is designed to help managers assess and identify the most appropriate service areas to target for value-for-money initiatives, and then provides specific advice and support to help them develop and, most importantly of all, deliver the relevant outcomes. The toolkit guides staff through the process of reviewing a service to asses efficiency. In the first instance, it helps to identify priority areas. Then it works through an assessment of how the service is now using methods such as process mapping and workflow analysis. This is followed by an assessment of the areas for potential savings, specific actions and a pilot trial, leading to full implementation, if warranted by results. Even in its pilot year, the toolkit has helped managers identify and subsequently introduce three significant efficiency projects relating to council tax collection, land charges, and the authority’s cash office. The work on council tax collection has pointed to a potential £1.4m efficiency saving for a service which is already performing well. This project illustrates the use of one of the main tools in the toolkit – a databank that pulls together performance information from a range of sources, and spits it out in a very digestible form for managers. Cost and performance indicators covering the range of council services are fed into the databank. It is constructed by department and then broken down by key service areas. The indicators which are used are agreed with the relevant managers. Merton’s performance against each indicator is given a traffic light that compares performance with the borough’s nearest neighbours. A series of graphs is also produced that show managers how their service performs against different factors. Taking council tax as an example, one graph plotted the cost of collection against the percentage of council tax collected. This revealed Merton’s performance in both areas was better than average. But, significantly, the graph showed there was scope to improve the percentage of council tax collected by 1%. This would yield an extra £1.4m in collected council tax, with no increase in the cost of collection. As a result, Neil Adams, recovery manager, and Sean Cunniffe, local taxation manager, visited a neighbouring borough which had a higher collection rate, to see what it was doing differently. The somewhat unexpected discovery was that the council in question had a less-aggressive stance to recovery than Merton, which was paying dividends by giving people more opportunity to pay. Merton has now reviewed and revised its approach, which is also saving on court costs and staff time – not to mention complaints. But being more efficient can also be about stopping doing something. The toolkit helps managers carry out an options appraisal to help them ‘think the unthinkable’. The options-appraisal approach helps to get buy-in on difficult decisions, as it gives all the stakeholders in that decision a common and agreed view of the options of taking action or not taking action. It allows them to ‘weight’ different aspects of the service in question, for example, how well it fits with corporate objectives. Merton applied this approach to its cash office. All options were considered – keeping it as it was or closing it down, and weighted scores were agreed for a range of factors. The scores pointed to the decision, which was to automate the cash office and make service available in a wider range of locations. Merton’s toolkit is already proving its value, and when the databank is rolled out across the council in a few weeks, there are great hopes that managers will really be able to get to grips with delivering genuine efficiency savings. w Julie Evans is head of customer services at Merton LBC
