WIREDGOV

The Commission, established in April 2013 by the First Minister and chaired by Sir Paul Williams, was tasked with examining all aspects of public services in Wales and making recommendations on their future direction.

Its report, published today, contains over 60 recommendations to:

• Reduce the complexity of the public sector by removing duplication and making sure organisations work together effectively.
• Increase the capacity of local authorities by reducing their number to combat the serious problems of small scale and create significant long-term savings.  This will help protect front-line jobs and services.
• Strengthen governance and scrutiny so that services are responsive and the mechanisms for holding the public sector to account are better informed and more effective.
• Ensure that citizens and communities are at the heart of service design and delivery.
• Create new and more coherent approaches to leadership to ensure the best people as leaders are appointed and developed.
• Encourage a new culture of one public service for Wales with organisations united around a shared, collaborative and citizen centred set of public service values.
• Simplify and streamlining performance management by introducing a single and concise set of national outcomes, with local partnerships and organisations feeding in to them, to increase clarity and accountability.

Chair of the Commission, Sir Paul Williams, said:

“I am very pleased to publish our report today. It is the culmination of eight months of painstaking work, and reflects the broad and fundamental remit, which the First Minister gave us. I would like to thank my fellow Commissioners for their time and effort, and the very many members of the public and public servants who took time to give us detailed, extensive and thoughtful, evidence.

“We are very clear that public services in Wales face severe and prolonged challenges.  The effects of recession and austerity on public-sector budgets will continue to be felt for many years.  At the same time, our population is changing, meaning that the need for some of our most intensive and costly public services is bound to grow.  That creates twin and conflicting pressures – demand for public services is growing, through demographic change and increasing public expectations, while resources to provide them are falling.  These pressures are nobody’s fault, but they will be felt by all of us.

“Radical change is needed for public services to survive in a viable and sustainable form. We cannot deny or ignore current and future challenges; instead, we need a public sector which can rise to meet them. We need a radical shift, which will mean fundamental changes to structures, roles and programmes across the Welsh public sector. We all need to embrace the need for change, and make it happen as quickly and effectively as possible. It is far better to invest in reform now, before it is too late, and to create world-class public services and a public sector of which we can all be proud.

“The problems we have found are hard wired into the systems, processes and values of the public sector as it stands. They are interdependent and mutually reinforcing - and they demand equally interlinked solutions. We hope our recommendations will be implemented as a whole - in isolation they will not provide the solution to the problems faced by public services in Wales. Issues of culture and leadership, for example, are just as important to the delivery of sustainable public services as the structural changes that we recommend.  We urge the Welsh Government, the Assembly and the wider public sector to proceed accordingly."