RSS feedsNeedless administrative duplication in the public sector is costing taxpayers millions of pounds a year and damaging service delivery, the CBI said today.
The business lobby group urged the government to match savings achieved in the private sector by merging back office functions such as human resources and finance administration.
Central government departments alone could save as much as £560m over the next two years if they implemented 'best in class' HR and finance shared services.
The CBI said top civil servants should have tough targets set in their individual performance management objectives as an incentive to deliver shared services savings more quickly.
The report Transformation through shared services: improving quality, increasing efficiency outlines the business case for shared services, including economies of scale, better information sharing, aggregation of buying power and greater opportunities for staff to develop specialist skills.
But it says the implementation of shared services by the government has, to
date, been ad hoc and incremental, achieving few savings or improvements to
public service delivery.
CBI director-general Sir Digby Jones said: 'Sharing administrative functions can deliver massive savings, freeing up resources to improve the quality of the services people use.
'There has been a lot of talk about shared services but not much action. The government should press forward with this agenda, which its own Gershon report set out.
'We need to see an end to some parts of the public sector operating with blind indifference to each other, wasting money undertaking functions separately that would work better delivered together.'
