Training Blog

Gordon Brown has said overpaid public sector workers will be “named and shamed” in efforts to deliver more value for money in public services. Ahead of the pre-Budget report, the PM said “efficiency savings” would help to save £12bn over four years – £3bn more than planned in the Budget. Crime maps and online school reports will be used to cut overheads as Labour tries to halve the Budget deficit.

The Conservatives say the government is not being straight on the cuts needed. The government has delayed its planned comprehensive spending review until after a general election. In the pre-Budget report, Mr Darling is expected to confirm annual borrowing will top £175bn – which the government has promised to halve within four years. In his speech in central London, Mr Brown said ministers had identified £3bn in additional efficiency savings since the Budget in April.

Of that, £1.3bn over four years would be achieved by streamlining central government, he said, indicating that certain programmes would have to be delayed or abandoned. We need to do what households up and down the country do to prioritise the necessities and postpone the things we can do without

Government spending on consultants would be cut by half and communication spending by a quarter – saving £650m – while more Civil Service staff would be relocated from London to “cheaper” premises. Whitehall departments could set up “common spending policies” and share office space, as part of a “third generation of changes in public services”. In its report, Putting The Frontline First, the government points out there are now 4,300 senior civil servants compared with 3,100 in the mid-1990s.

Mr Brown said public sector workers earning an “over-generous” salary would be “named and shamed”, as many had “lost touch” with normality. In future, all new public sector jobs with salaries above £150,000 will have to be approved by the Treasury while the details of civil servants and other public sector managers under direct ministerial control currently earning that amount will be published.

Mr Brown has ordered a review of senior public sector pay by the Senior Salaries Review Body to report by the Spring. He said: “Money which should be spent on health, on schools, on policing and on social services is, in some cases, going on excessive salaries and unjustified bonuses, far beyond the expectation of the majority of workers. This culture of excess must change and will change.” He added that the government would use technological advances to make services more user-friendly and cheaper.

As an example, sending text messages to remind patients about GP appointments could help save up to £600m a year wasted on missed visits. The public needed more “feedback and interaction” when using services, such as crime maps and giving parents online details of children’s progress at school, he added. Mr Brown promised to bring more such details on to the internet by next year. “The proposals we are setting out in this plan – which is just one element of our efforts to reduce the deficit – will go further than we have ever gone before in streamlining central government,” Mr Brown said.

“We have already promised savings of £35bn a year by 2011 on top of the £26.5bn a year already delivered through the Gershon [spending] review. “But by identifying new ways of working – and being prepared to make the tough choices – we can deliver in excess of another £12bn in efficiency savings over the next four years.
“This includes £3bn of new efficiency savings identified since the Budget – of which over £1.3bn will come from streamlining central government.”

The proposals were laid out in Parliament by Liam Byrne, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who said that saving money should be “everybody’s business”. Chancellor Alistair Darling told BBC One’s Andrew Marr show that public spending would be “a lot tighter than it was in the past” as a result.

He said parts of the troubled £12bn NHS IT system would be delayed as it “isn’t essential to the front line” – a move Health Secretary Andy Burnham told MPs on Monday would save £600m “over the lifetime of the programme”. Mr Darling said the full details of spending cuts would not be revealed until “the first half of next year at some point”.

Meanwhile, as part of plans to tackle the deficit in public finances, the Treasury is working on a possible windfall tax on what it sees as the exceptional profits of banks or the excessive bonuses of bankers.
But the Conservatives say the government is still not revealing the full extent of cuts needed to tackle Britain’s debts.

They say they would protect NHS and international development spending but the rest of Whitehall would face “very difficult choices” if the Tories won power. The party has also called for a moratorium on all government computer projects, claiming Labour has spent £100bn on IT since 1997 and that contracts worth another £70bn are due to be renewed or commissioned in the next two years.

Shadow Treasury minister Philip Hammond told MPs: “Since 2000 they’ve poured billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into indifferent public services, borrowing and spending like it’s Monopoly money.”
He called Labour’s savings plans a “mish-mash of announcements and stolen clothes, in the dying months of their rule”.

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said: “If the government knew there was inefficiency, why hasn’t the government already dealt with it?” We have now reached the point where the investment gap which we inherited…in 1997 has been fixed.

He added that more had to be done to improve the level of independence local government has from Whitehall, in an effort to increase accountability. Jonathan Baume, general secretary of the First Division Association, which represents senior civil servants, called the government’s proposals on public sector workers “irresponsible”. He added that “this announcement looks more like crude electioneering than a sober assessment of the implications for central government of the fiscal crisis”.

In businesses where there are groups of people working it is important that they’re able to work together. If they are not able to work together, it results in conflict and low productivity. In some cases it can result in major mistakes being made.

Ideally all members of the group should share the same ideas and goals. However in reality often the goals are shared within the team but the ideas about how to achieve that sometimes differ. This can be a good thing as long as there is good clear communication and the ability to compromise in order to get things done.

The team dynamic usually consists of degree of hierarchy, where each person is assigned a role. In a medical setting you can see this within individual departments which are smaller teams within a larger team, that is the hospital, which is a smaller team with a particular trust and so on until you get to the largest team of all the NHS.

Now we’ve all seen the stories on the news about the NHS failing, this is because their are parts of this team that are not working effectively. If you think about it logically each department is essentially a business if it does not work effectively then it loses customers this can then impact on the hospital as a whole because if you have a bad experience in one department then you are not likely to go back or at the very least reluctant to go to the hospital where you had the bad experience fearing that if you do the same thing may happen again.

There are a number of options that can be applied to rectify the situation:

• Change the Team
• Alter the hierarchy
• Take Courses in team management and effectiveness

If you decided to take the 3rd option then your next question is who/where can i find these courses. Well there is a company called Medicology Ltd. This company offers a diverse range of tools to help you make your team the best it can be.

The definition of business excellence is: a state of organizational performance achieved through the successful integration of a variety of operational and strategic elements that enables an organization to become one of the best in its field. Excellence is initially evident when an organization rises above its competitors, and it is usually measured by the ability to sustain a leading or significant market share. The strategic and operational elements contributing to excellence include the organization’s approach to total quality management, quality assurance, quality awards and quality standards, core competency, benchmarking, customer service, the balanced scorecard, and leadership. Taken altogether, these components should produce an organizational approach to the generation, development, and delivery of products and services that is better, cheaper, and smarter than that of the competition. Attempts at becoming an excellent organization have spawned terms such as best practice, best-in-class, and world class manufacturing and are usually associated with a holistic approach to competitive advantage.

So clinical business excellence takes this definition and applies it to clinical settings. Medicology has a centre of excellence in this area. They are already running courses to help the NHS staff develop on both a professional and a personal level. Now they are holding a conference on, yes you guessed it, Clinical Business Excellence. This conference will be held on the 29th June 2010 at Park Crescent Conference Centre. For more details see clinicalbusiness.co.uk.

A government minister has told bankers “to come back into the real world” after Royal Bank of Scotland directors threatened to resign over bonuses. City Minister Lord Myners said it was unrealistic that bankers should expect to be paid million pound bonuses.

RBS reportedly wants to pay a total of £1.5bn in bonuses to investment banking staff, and the board has threatened to quit if the government blocks the move. The Treasury said it would intervene if it was in the interest of taxpayers.

Meanwhile, Barclays is planning on increasing the non-variable element of staff pay at Barclays Capital, its investment bank, the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston says. The Government is caught between a rock and a hard place. Many voters cannot understand why taxpayer supported banks should pay their staff any extra bonuses.

In January the Chancellor will have to approve the bonus pot at RBS. Any increase could generate a backlash against the government. But the City doesn’t like what’s seen as interference in the boardroom. Looks like this will run and run. Barclays maintains that by pushing up salaries, it is only doing what G20 governments have asked it to do, by shifting the weight of pay from the variable portion – ie bonuses – to fixed.

Lord Myners has estimated that at least 5,000 bankers in the UK will earn more than £1m this year. He told the BBC that the median wage in the UK was just over £20,000 a year, and yet some bankers expected as a matter of course to receive bonuses, in addition to their salaries, of millions of pounds.

He also said banks needed to be mindful of the fact that much of the profit they were now making was due to “the benign conditions” created by the government pumping billions of pounds into the economy to stimulate demand. RBS directors say it is their legal duty to act in the interests of shareholders, and that if they do not pay competitive bonuses, top talent will leave the bank.

This would have an adverse impact on profitability, and therefore the bank’s ability to repay the taxpayer, they argue. Business Secretary Lord Mandelson said: “I understand the point that RBS directors are expressing – they say they have to remain competitive in the market in recruiting senior executives, and this is why it’s important that all the banks are equally restrained, and RBS is not singled out.”

The Conservatives said the government was sending out mixed messages. Shadow financial secretary Mark Hoban said: “The government’s policy on bonuses is a muddle. The city minister claims he will veto big bonuses only to be superseded by the business secretary calling for banks merely to show restraint.

“We have been clear – no significant cash bonuses should be paid out this year and that money should go towards increasing lending to the families and businesses who propped up the banks in the first place.”
Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said the government should “call the bluff” of the RBS directors and accept their resignations. “The government has to impose itself and must not be pushed around,” he told the BBC. One banking analyst went a step further, suggesting the directors should be sacked. “Their job is very simple – to fulfil the requirements of the shareholders. If we tell them to paint everything blue, everything has to be blue,” said Ralph Silva at SRN. “They should not be going up against shareholders. I think we should fire them [before they resign].”

But he also argued that the government would be making a mistake if it told the bank not to pay bonuses. The best bankers who brought in the most profit would leave, he said, and for this reason he thought the bonuses would be paid. But others took a more sympathetic line with the RBS directors. Stephen Regan at the Cranfield School of Management said that shareholders could not call the shots and only had the power to call an extraordinary general meeting, at which they could vote on whether to oust the board.

“Ownership is with the shareholders, but control of the business is with the directors,” he said. The government owns 70% of RBS after bailing out the bank during the height of the financial crisis, a stake that is set to rise to 84% following the Treasury’s recent pledge to inject billions more into the bank.

Last month, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced that the Treasury, as the major shareholder in the bank, would have the “right to consent” to how much RBS pays in bonuses and how they are paid. RBS is said to want to pay £2bn in bonuses across the group for its performance in 2009, with £1.5bn going to its investment banking division, which is expected to make £6bn in profits this year.