Chancellor of the Exchequer and Chief Secretary to the Treasury invite suggestions from the public sector on how to achieve more while saving public money ahead of the Spending Review.
Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, and Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Member of Parliament for Chelsea and Fulham, Greg Hands, wrote to public sector workers on Monday, 3 August, asking for their ideas on how the Government might achieve more while saving public money through the Public Sector Efficiency Challenge.
In a letter to millions of public sector workers, including teachers, nurses, and civil servants, as well as British diplomats and service personnel stationed round the globe, the Chancellor and Chief Secretary invited them to take part in an online survey to share their ideas for doing more while saving public money, ahead of this year’s Spending Review
This follows a similar exercise in 2010 in which people who were working on the front line were asked to suggest ways to improve the public services they provide, using their expertise and knowledge of how those services are actually delivered.
Examples of ideas from the public sector workforce for doing more with less that were eventually put into practice included:
stopping the distribution of National Insurance numbers to people with a plastic card;
and reducing the need for multiple Criminal Records Bureau checks by making greater use of electronic access for employers.
Ideas put forward also influenced more radical policy changes, such as spending money more effectively by introducing a more preventative focus across public services and building closer links across health and social care.
Millions of public sector workers have been invited to send in their ideas via a short online survey which closes on 4 September. The survey can be found at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HVW38NC
All good ideas received by this date will be looked at and considered by the Treasury and Cabinet Office, in partnership with Government departments, as part of the Spending Review process.
Although the Government will have made savings of nearly £100 billion by 2015/16, more still needs to be done to ensure that Britain will run a surplus for the first time in almost twenty years in 2019/20, delivering economic security for working people.
The Spending Review, which will be published on 25 November 2015, will set out how the Government will invest in priority public services and deliver the £20 billion of further savings required to eliminate Britain’s deficit by 2019-2020.
This will be the next step in fixing the nation’s finances, following the Summer Budget where the Government outlined how it will deliver £12 billion of welfare savings and £5 billion from addressing avoidance, evasion, and imbalances in the tax system to deliver half of the savings needed to eliminate the deficit over the next four years.