I recently gave a webinar about ‘seven ways to save and improve’ and practical public sector savings opportunities: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_making-savings-in-the-public-sector-activity-7348261926998536194-qaay – or drop me your email if you’d like the papers
‘We’ve done agile. We’ve done human learning systems. We’ve done transformation.’
But have we done savings?
It might not be fashionable to say so – but in 2025, every council must still confront the hard truths of #costcutting and #efficiency. That doesn’t mean giving up on #publicvalue. It means doing the work to understand where savings are truly possible – and where our current systems are actively preventing us from seeing them.
At a recent iNetwork session, I shared our ‘seven ways to save and improve’. It’s a simple model – demand, contact, process, resources, organisation, sourcing, policy – but it unlocks complex insights. Too many savings efforts target the middle (procurement, process improvement, digital) without looking upstream (shaping demand, creating flow) or downstream (interoperability, organisational alignment).
If you only focus on back-end efficiencies, you risk entrenching the very models that drive failure demand in the first place. And if you only optimise what’s measurable, you miss what matters. Optimising a van fleet might save £50k – but if your temporary accommodation policy creates a perverse £5m housing market, you’re losing ten times more.
We need to be ruthless about waste – but we also need to be imaginative about redesign. That means thinking in systems, embracing the uncomfortable truths that surface in citizen contact, and building real capability, not just capacity.
What’s the most inconvenient source of savings your organisation is refusing to look at right now?
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Still time to join me this morning at 10am for the Making Savings in the Public Sector event with iNetwork Solutions. I’ll share our ‘seven ways to save and improve’ model and chair a discussion with:
* Zakki Ghauri, Director of Digital, Information & Technology at City of London – who’ll talk about savings achieved at the City of London Corporation.
* Digital Care Hub will explore how to enable return on investment (ROI) for technology and software spend – effective digital transformation in the care sector.
* Engage Process will discuss how service redesign and a process management platform can enable savings to be made.
* Tracey Nation, Category Manager at the NHS North of England Commercial Procurement Collaborative will share how they typically deliver savings, including a detailed look at a recent large-scale collaborative project that generated savings across multiple Trusts.
I’ll send participants our key guides to ‘seven ways to save and improve’, a holistic and practical tool to look for savings areas.
If your organisation isn’t an iNetwork member, it’s chargeable – but if you drop me your name and email address – or just comment that you’d like the papers in the chat – I’ll send you the guides and some notes from the conversation.
Sign up: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/making-savings-in-the-public-sector-registration-1268945673669
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