Merry Christmas from all at Civica!

On behalf of everyone at Civica we wish you a very Happy Christmas and best wishes for the New Year.

As part of our ongoing commitment to give back to the community and reduce our carbon footprint we will make a donation to our chosen charity, 'Water for Kids' instead of sending Christmas cards.

For further information about the great work Water for Kids undertakes visit www.waterforkids.org.uk

DWP Public Consultation: Supporting People into Work

The DWP has launched the consultation documents for their Supporting People into Work: The next stage of Housing Benefit reform.

The consultation process seeks views from local authorities, housing associations, advice workers and landlords regarding the department's reforms of housing benefit. The proposals aim to ensure that housing benefit is better able to help people into work, is fairer, more efficiently delivered and represents good value for money for the taxpayer.

Full details can be downloaded here

Big week for Public Service Changes!

The pre-budget report may be the most important event of the week, but it stands amid other announcements that reflect the way public services are changing. We've also seen the first release of results from a new way of monitoring local councils' performance, plus the Treasury report on public sector reform, Smarter Government,

Oneplace Launch
The new framework for inspecting local services, known as Oneplace and accessible via the government's Directgov website, is a bid to get over the well-known problem of previous inspections: councils were capable of meeting the targets, but missing the point. Their internal workings could be four-star, but the services they were actually delivering might fall well short of excellence.

Oneplace assesses not just councils, but also police authorities, primary care trusts and fire and rescue services. The output is not a league table or star system, but a "narrative in plain English" of the priorities that areas have themselves set. The initial launch appeared to be a success with reports that on the first day the site was visited by more than 54,000 people a volume which led to the collapse of the site for a period.

The new monitoring system, which covers 152 areas of England, uses a flag system to signal examples of particularly good or bad practice.

A Solution to better Services?
It's new for local areas and it's new for the six inspectorates involved, led by the local authority watchdog, the Audit Commission. However, there has already been criticism of the amount of time and resource local authorities must now allocate to various inspection and reporting processes. And the key question remains will it get closer to what the public perceive as good-value local public services?

Links
Oneplace
Audit Commission Website
Audit Commission Tweets
DirectGov
Adapted from original article featured in The Guardian

IFS Claims More Public Sector Cuts to Come

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has claimed that the Chancellor has still to announce a further £15bn of cuts to Public Sector spending. This is on top of those included in the Pre Budget Report on Wednesday.

If true it would appear that, along with a few bankers, Public Sector budgets are amongst hardest hit by the final PBR before the Election. But the figures are being denied by Jack Straw who said the IFS had not taken into account savings the government has already made "We've already spent £4bn less on unemployment benefits and income support for the unemployed than was anticipated." He added that the government hoped to make further savings by "moderating the rate of increase of unemployment".

Strong Provider/Authority Partnerships Key
Whatever the truth of the real depth of the cuts, it will be those managers within the sector who produce the most innovative solutions across their service provision who'll benefit the most. Following the recent announcements by the Prime Minister, there can be no doubt that investment in technology has a role to play in this process. However, with tightening of budgets, greater emphasis will be placed on providers and Local Authorities to work together to identify the most suitable initiatives that will achieve long term efficiency savings and improvements to services.

Links
Institute of Fiscal Studies
Pre Budget Report 2009 Microsite
PBR Summary facts & figures from FT.com

2009 Pre-Budget Report Announcement Predictions

Alistair Darling will deliver his Pre-Budget report Wednesday 9 December. The main focus of the headlines will inevitably centre around the on-going war between the Government and the City, Inheritance Tax thresholds and Captial Gains Tax, but there will also be implications for the public sector.

Possible areas of interest include:
- Further details on the plans to reduce public spending
- Announcement of £2.5bn for training schemes & benefits to help reduce youth long term unemployment
- Reduction on upper limits of means tested benefits
- Possible taxation plan for child benefit but only for high income earners

The FT has summarised a number of expert predictions for the report content. Click here to read more

You can follow the latest announcements and possible implications live on the sites below:-

Links
HM Treasury PBR Microsite
Deloitte UKBudget Twitter Live Updates
HM Treasury Twitter site
BBC PBR Site

PM Announces Plans for Online Government Future

The prime minister has confirmed the government's ambitions to make many services available only online and to open access to data

In a speech to mark the publication of the Putting the Frontline First: smarter government paper, Gordon Brown said that moving services and data online was part of "the third generation of changes" to public services.

"Our aim is - within the next five years - to shift the great majority of our large transactional services to become online only”

Over the next year, the government will say how it plans to move transactions online as soon as it can, starting with student loans, jobseekers' allowance, working tax credits and child benefit. In 2011, VAT and employer tax returns will move exclusively online. Mr Brown said this could save £400m as a first step and billions further on.

On online information, the prime minister said: "Every citizen will from next year have access to all information on the performance of our public services showing how, and in great detail, hospitals schools and all our public services perform in your own neighbourhood.

"We will give our frontline services greater freedoms and flexibilities to respond innovatively to this data, reducing the number of ring fenced budgets, rationalising different central funding projects and joining up capital funding within a local area," he added.

More resources will also be switched from back office functions to the front line of public sector workers, as outlined in the Frontline First paper, and emphasised the role of technology in making services more responsive to users' needs.

"Information is the key. An informed citizen is a powerful citizen," he said, adding that more public sector datasets could be opened for general access, including those within local authorities, the NHS, police and education.

"And these must all have the opportunity for feedback and interaction, for that is where power lies for the citizen," added Brown, mentioning NHS Choices as an example of allowing patients to review and rate services.

To help citizens get online, the government will put another £30m into the UK Online programme, to get another 1m people online by 2012.

Links
Frontline First Website
Frontline First Paper
Smarter Government Speech by Gordon Brown
Government Digital Engagement Blog

Stockport MBC - Another Civica OPENRevenues Winner!

Stockport MBC were named winners at the recent LGC Finance Awards!

We're delighted they were successful in the category for Quality of Service and Innovation at the event in Claridges Hotel, London hosted by the BBC's Bill Turnbull. You can see pictures from the evening here

This is the second announcement we have been able to make for Stockport within 6 months, following their recognition at the Guardian's GC Awards for their Flexible and Remote Working Programme earlier this year!

It brings to a total of six major awards won by Civica OPENRevenues customers in the second half of 2009!

We're pleased to pass on our congratulations once again to everyone involved.

Government Five Year IT Strategy Proposal Leak

A version of Government ICT Strategy: “New world, New challenges, New opportunities” which is aimed at positioning the government's approach to IT for the next five years has been leaked prior to its planned release later this month.

Below is a brief summary of the alleged main findings and recommendations of the "review".

New Technology focus:
The leaked report claims many new technologies will become mainstream over the next 5 years, but that the three it names are of particular interest.

Web 2.0: will provide the basis to improve public sector interaction with customers and partners.

Cloud technology: will enable the development of different business models for the procurement, use and reuse of applications; and service oriented architecture – which provides a set of principles and concepts defining how services interact with each other – can enable the delivery of the G Cloud and an online store of government applications.

Semantic technologies: which separate data and content files from application code and meanings, and could enable computers to handle transactional tasks that currently require human intervention also feature with the review.
It also points to location aware services, human computer interaction – which removes the need for a keyboard – and technologies for more energy efficient operations.

Extension of existing Intiatives
The paper also provides details on a number of existing initiatives, outlining 14 strands of activity. Among other uses the first of these is the Public Sector Network, which will lay the ground for a number of standardised services such as authentication, secure file transfer and federated email.

A prototype of the G Cloud infrastructure is scheduled for delivery early in 2010, and a pilot version of the Government Applications Store, an online portal for the sharing and re-use of business applications, should be launched in the first half of the year.

Shared Service and Convergence
The paper also outlines plans to develop 10-12 highly resilient strategic data centres for the public sector over the next three years, and to develop a common desktop strategy. This will involve delivering 80% of central government desktops through a shared utility service by 2015, and promoting wider use by the rest of the public sector. It is also planned to converge with the cloud by 2015.

Other areas covered in the document include shared services, architecture and standards, open source, green ICT, information security and assurance, the government IT profession, better project delivery, supply management, and internal alignment and compliance.

Finally, the paper emphasises that, while the Cabinet Office, the Chief Information Officers Council and the Office of Government Commerce will provide leadership, the strategy will be implemented primarily by individual organisations.

Early reaction has been mixed and we’ll be posting a summary of responses and opinions as the story develops.

Original article posted on www.guadian.co.uk

LA Revenue Expenditure and Financing: Final Outturn

The latest national statistics on the final outturn estimates of local authority revenue expenditure and financing for 2008-09 were released on 3 December 2009 under arrangements approved by the UK Statistics Authority.

The key points from the latest release are:

- Total net current expenditure by local authorities in England was estimated to be £113.1 billion in 2008-09 compared with £108.2 billion in 2007-08, an increase of 4 per cent.

- 37 per cent of net current expenditure in 2008-09 was on education, 17 per cent on social care, 13 per cent on housing benefits and 10 per cent on police.

- 54 per cent of revenue expenditure (on a non-Financial Reporting Standard 17 basis) in 2008-09 was funded by government grants, 25 per cent by council tax and 21 per cent by redistributed non-domestic rates.

The full report is available here