Total Place - another warning

Public Finance today carries an overview of emerging lessons from the Total Place pilots.

Scroll down and you get to the reality; "if the initiative is beginning to feel like a magic wand that can easily be waved to painlessly remedy the public sector deficit, one passage from the Birmingham report might give optimists pause.

Under the heading ‘delivering major cross-sector efficiencies,’ the report argues that multiple back-office functions ‘are luxuries we can no longer afford’. It resolves to ‘deliver radical cost savings through rationalisation in these areas’.

The report was sent to PF the day after Birmingham City Council published its 2010/11 financial plan, which included a likely cull of up to 2,000 posts.

Local unions are already gearing up to fight the plans. The completion of the Total Place pilots could well signal the start of a new era of efficiency and effectiveness in public services. But it could just as easily mark the beginning of a long and convulsive period of large-scale public sector reorganisation."

UNISON activists need to climb out of our Service Group bunkers to deal with the "long and convulsive period" ahead of us.