Service Design

This article flags up the difficulty of taking time out from fire fighting to stop the cause of the fire in the first place. It is something we know about all too well. It tells us:

More than £10bn of taxpayers’ money is being wasted because the government continues to ignore emerging warning signs on key public services, allowing pressures to build—and then diverting emergency cash to the

This wasteful cycle is highlighted in new analysis from the Institute for Government and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), published on 19 October. Worryingly, Performance Tracker, our data-driven analysis of nine public services – across health, education, law and order, neighbourhood services and immigration – finds that this emergency cash isn’t being used to solve the underlying issues in these services, but is simply keeping them going in their current state.

Prisons, for instance, are in the middle of a serious operational crisis after a failure to spot warning signs in the data when the government doubled down on cuts to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) budget in the 2015 spending review.

The chancellor also has little room to manoeuvre on hospitals, which will continue to run deficits. Despite these overspends, accident and emergency waiting targets are still being missed, and the number of people waiting for elective surgery is the highest it has been for a decade. Demand continues to rise with emergency accident and emergency admissions up 3% in the last year, and 30% since 2009.

The government has already made cash injections in schools and adult social care- but these are little more than sticking plasters.