Exeter expert to outline radical reforms to UK public services that could save millions

The UK’s public services could be saved from ‘falling off a cliff’ if administrative functions in areas such as council tax collection utilised cloud-based online platforms.

Mark Thompson, a Professor of Digital Economy at the University of Exeter and member of Digit Lab, is set to make this case for UK public service reform at events held at the Labour and Conservative Party conferences in Liverpool and Birmingham.

He will argue that issuing and collecting Council Tax via a Netflix-style digital platform would eliminate the duplication of effort and costs across local authorities, making for a more streamlined system and reducing annual spending from £1.11bn to around £8.5m.

He identifies other public services that could make savings and efficiencies – registrars could reduce annual spending from £110m to £0.85m through the introduction of identity verification platforms which would eliminate the current requirement for each of the 1.5 million births, deaths and marriages across England and Wales each year to be registered face-to-face.

Professor Thompson will also target Housing Associations, which manage nearly a fifth of the UK’s housing stock, arguing that a sector-wide payments and arrears service could reduce annual expenditure from £200m to £1.5m, and allow staff across the sector to be redeployed in front line customer facing roles.

“Public services are heading towards a cliff – staying the same isn’t an option anymore,” Professor Thompson said.

“Part of the problem is the massive duplication of corporate activity between public services, which wastes many billions each year, prevents our services from working effectively together, and directly defunds crucial front line services such as social housing, teachers, doctors and nurses, social care, and police on the street.

“But there is a way to for government to persuade public service organisations to adopt common ways of doing some things – by working with the private sector to develop standardised, digitally-enabled services that can be consumed a bit like Netflix, with the risk and reward of adoption shared between both parties.

“Our evidence shows that when government centrally funds these ‘servitised platforms’, offering them to public service organisations at no cost, they will overcome their differences and adopt these services en masse.”

Professor Thompson was one of the architects behind NHS Jobs, which streamlined recruitment across the NHS, delivering a more efficient and effective service while eliminating bureaucracy and generating over £1bn in savings for NHS Trusts across England and Wales.

It was an early example of a ‘servitised platform’ – an online system connecting people, businesses, or services to share information, resources, or tools – which in principle operates similarly to a streaming service such as Netflix.

Before NHS Jobs, NHS organisations across the country handled all aspects of recruitment separately, with jobs advertised in print-based national, local and specialist publications, and with different processes for CV reviewing, shortlisting, interview scheduling, job offers and reference checking.

NHS Jobs for the first time provided national visibility of vacancies while offering NHS employers end-to-end recruitment automation, enhanced management information and national reach.

Professor Thompson argues that other UK public services can follow the example of NHS Jobs and use ‘servitised platforms’ to achieve similar functional and economic benefits, and sets out his arguments for reform in the report ‘NHS Jobs: How servitised platforms can modernize our public services’.

“The servitised platform is an important and hitherto overlooked delivery model with the potential to make a significant contribution to the urgent modernisation that is needed, by enabling many services to be consumed just once, rather than built/configured/maintained many times, throughout the public domain,” said Professor Thompson. 

Mark Thompson, a Professor of Digital Economy at the University of Exeter and member of Digit Lab, an EPSRC Next Stage Digital Economy Research Centre, will be speaking at the event “Improving Public Service Productivity: Can we have better services for less money?” on 24 September at the Labour Party Conference and 30 September at the Conservative Party Conference will be hosted by the Institute for Government, Google Cloud UK and the University of Exeter.