The Chancellor has brought forward plans for almost £2 billion of benefits to be achieved by improving productivity in the public sector.
As part of government plans to reduce public spending and cut the ‘ever-increasing’ bill for services, productivity within the sector is being promoted. This could bring benefits of £1.8 billion by 2029, as the plan works to support public servants getting back to doing the most important parts of their jobs.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has claimed that £20 billion a year could be saved by returning the sector to pre-pandemic productivity levels, whilst also ensuring that service quality remains high. This latest announcement has been billed as the first step towards making these savings as plans are put in place to deliver improvements across health, policing, justice, local government, and child services.
Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer, commented:
“We shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking more spending buys us better public services. There is too much waste in the system and we want public servants to get back to doing what matters most: teaching our children, keeping us safe and treating us when we’re sick.
That’s why our plan is about reaping the rewards of productivity, from faster access to MRIs for patients to hundreds of thousands of police hours freed up to attend burglaries or incidents of domestic abuse.”
In health, productivity and service improvements are to be achieved by upgrading more than one hundred MRI scanners in England with artificial intelligence. This will enable more than 130,000 patients a year, including those who are awaiting results for cancer tests, to get their test results much sooner. The AI will speed up this process by being able to recognise patterns in scans thanks to machine learning abilities.
The success of Violence Reduction Units is hoped to be reproduced, with £75 million over three years being committed to expanding the model across England and Wales. Alongside the Grip hot spot policing programme (which tries to deter serious violence through patrol activity), this is expected to improve upon the 136,000 violent offences and 3,220 hospital admissions that have been prevented since 2019.
Following the Police Productivity Review, the government has also planned to save police time. The review found that every year, up to 38 million hours of officer time can be saved, however, the government has found that only 500,000 of officer hour savings can bring about significant improvements. These improvements include attending an additional 250,000 incidents of domestic abuse, or over 300,000 burglaries.
With those savings in mind, more than £230 million is being invested by the government for the rollout of time-saving technologies. These include automated redaction of personal information, as well as interviewing witnesses and victims via video call, and expanding the use of drones.
Overall, this announcement means a total of £800 million of investment by the end of the decade to bring about productivity benefits in the sector. These include:
- £170 million for the justice system to support the saving of administrative time.
- £165 million into child social care placements to reduce local authority overspends.
- £34 million to reduce fraud and save public money.
- £17 million to accelerate the modernisation of DWP services.
- A new AI pilot to cut the time needed to process planning applications by 30%.
- A £105 million fund to support children with additional needs with new free schools.
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