5.41 The paragraphs above set out a strategy for developing local incentives and empowerment through area-based approaches, engaging with the frontline and facilitating innovation. These approaches should help to open up space on the frontline, but there is still further to go to reduce burdens in order to create more space for local areas and public sector professionals to take up these challenges, unencumbered by excessive requests and regulations that do not add value. Not all of these demands are the product of central government, but it often takes a determination on the part of central government to remove them. An integral and high profile part of its role should be to take a positive approach to identifying and, where possible, reducing these burdens.
5.42 Significant progress in this area has been made across government in recent years:
• the number of individual inspectorates has been rationalised and new 'gatekeeper' powers, where inspectorates oversee requests made of organisations within their remit, manage the burden of inspections on local authorities. The new CAA should help to limit the burden of inspection on local public bodies;
• the Lifting the Burdens Taskforce used local government practitioners to identify central requirements that cause difficulty on the ground and add least value, and agreed packages of burden reduction with relevant government departments; and
• Better Regulation Executive, leading many of these changes, has redesigned its website to provide an opportunity for the public and those who deliver public services to highlight unnecessary bureaucracy and have their suggestion followed up.
5.43 Despite this progress, government must be prepared to go further in eliminating avoidable burdens while protecting service quality. Currently, not enough is known about the scale, overlaps and duplication of information requests from a frontline perspective.
| Box 5.F: Independent Review of Policing by Sir Ronnie Flanagan In 2007-08, Sir Ronnie Flanagan carried out an Independent Review of Policing,20 focussing on the need to better manage the risks in order to reduce the threat to the public and reduce the harm caused by crime. A significant focus of the review was freeing up space by reducing unnecessary bureaucracy, and the review found that many different organisations in the system were adding to bureaucracy on the frontline. Since the review was published, Jan Berry, ex-Chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, has driven forward the bureaucracy reducing recommendations in the Flanagan Review, to challenge government and the police service to remove and/or reduce overly bureaucratic requirements, systems or processes. |
5.44 The Independent Review of Policing, as described in Box 5.F, found that a only a proportion of bureaucracy was imposed by the Home Office and that some of it was 'self imposed' by senior and middle-ranking officers and others in the chain of command. For schools and the NHS, local authorities, primary care trusts and strategic health authorities are likely to be substantial contributors to the burden on frontline. Similarly, the key issue for frontline workers can be more about internal management systems than they are about requests for data. Reviews of burdens in discrete services would be useful, provided that these are rapidly completed and the findings swiftly followed up to ensure that changes are relevant and there is continuous improvement.
5.45 As part of these reviews, organisational scale needs to be considered. Small primary schools, often with fewer than 10 staff, are unlikely to have the same capacity to absorb bureaucracy as large secondary schools with dedicated support staff. There are similar concerns about the regulatory burden on small businesses and the Government recently committed to a simplified or more flexible approach for business with fewer than 20 employees.21 A similar mindset is required in government's dealings with the smallest public sector organisations.
| Recommendation 5.6: Reviews of burdens from a frontline perspective should be introduced on a rolling basis, with short, intense reviews. They should be sector led, working with the Better Regulation Executive. These reviews should consider the potential for: • a streamlined approach to information requests placed on the smallest organisations; • organisations that fall outside of the LAA remit to have an explicit cap on the indicators and targets that they are subject to; and • inspectorates to primarily focus objectives agreed in LAA indicators and to look at other outcomes only whether there is some cause for concern. |
5.46 In order to embed a reduction in public sector bureaucratic burdens in the longer term, there should be a greater championing role in government, with strong political leadership. The Better Regulation Executive's role in reducing unnecessary bureaucracy in the public sector should be enhanced by linking with the work of the Cabinet Office on public service reform, so that suggestions for reducing the bureaucratic burden can be captured and acted upon.
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20 Independent review of policing, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, February 2008.
21 See for example www.berr.gov.uk/whatwedo/bre/policy/small-business/index.html