Clear information essential for efficiency
A major report on the Efficiency Delivery Programme calls for more detailed guidance and reporting on how money is saved in government.
The Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee is preparing a major report that, in the words of its Deputy Chair, “lays bare, once and for all, fallacies about efficiencies” and must be taken seriously across the public sector.
The review of the Efficiency Delivery Programme, conducted by the Northern Ireland Audit Office, was critical of the Department for Regional Development’s increases in parking fees and penalties, and the withdrawal of a £2.1 million bus route subsidy, which the department had termed as efficiency savings.
Savings claimed as the result of the disposal of surplus assets are also “dismissed as real subsidies,” Dallat added. The Department of Education was criticised for including savings as the result of a reduced budget as part of their 3 per cent efficiency savings.
The lack of assurance on whether genuine savings had been achieved meant that there has been “an alarming level of ignorance as to what a real efficiency saving is and what criteria should be used to measure its success.”
Government departments were not “comprehensive, transparent or meaningful” in reporting they saved money during the term of the last Assembly, the Northern Ireland Audit Office has found.
The report examined £1.6 billion in efficiency savings reported by departments between 2008 and 2011. A sample of 42 projects was selected.
“There are some good practice examples where real efficiency savings are likely to have been delivered,” Auditor General Kieran Donnelly stated. “These include areas such as improved procurement, energy efficiency and efforts to re-organise the workforce to improve productivity.” However, he added: “For around two-thirds of the projects we examined, the Audit Office can offer no assurance that genuine efficiency savings have been achieved. This reflects a lack of understanding of what represents an efficiency saving and a lack of sufficient financial and performance information.”
All planned efficiency savings, it stated, must be capable of being measured and the extensive best practice guidance on this had not been followed in most of the projects that were examined. In 14 cases, it was not possible to judge whether efficiency savings had been achieved as the projects did not have the necessary basic financial and performance information.
Fifteen projects are “likely to have achieved real efficiency savings” but in four of these, the Audit Office said there was “some risk that the quality of service to users has been adversely affected.” This contradicted the programme’s stated aim i.e. that efficiencies should not be achieved by simply cutting services to priority front-line services.
In management terms, guidance provided to departments was “not sufficiently detailed” and was “not always fully implemented.” The departments’ own efficiency delivery plans “lacked detail on the rationale for the chosen efficiencies” and offered “insufficient assurance” that front-line services were being protected.
Recommendations included more substantive guidance and staff training for future efficiency programmes, the setting up of a central body to advise departments on how to identify and measure efficiencies, and reporting annual performance in the same detail as the plans themselves.
Departments needed to improve their information systems, disseminate examples of good practice more widely, maintain a clear audit trail, and use performance indicators that “capture quality of service,” particularly in complex areas such as health.
“This report,” John Dallat said, “underlines the absolute need to preserve the independence of the Audit Office so that it can evaluate the performance of government departments and their agencies and give an independent assessment of performance.”
