With public services under pressure
from rising demand and stretched resources, the National Audit
Office (NAO) highlights that improving operational delivery is
crucial to enhance services and ensure value for
taxpayers.
In 2024-25, central government
departments were expected to spend over £450 billion on the
day-to-day running costs of public services, grants and
administration, which is approximately 35% of public spending.
Poor service across the public and private sectors costs UK
organisations around £7.3 billion every month, due to the amount
of employee's time fixing problems, handling complaints, and
dealing with things that went wrong.
In its latest report, the NAO outlines
the critical importance of smarter operational delivery – where
policy meets people – by drawing on a wide range of case studies
including the Home Office, DVLA and NHS to understand how
departments are innovating, adapting, and improving the way
public services are delivered.
The current operating
challenges for government organisations include:
-
New and changing levels of demand
for services, such as responding to seasonal patterns and
unforeseen crises
- Improving productivity and reducing costs to meet fiscal
challenges
- Changes to the operational capabilities and workforce needed
to manage and improve services
- Implementing the government's new ‘delivery
agenda'1 to improve outcomes from government's
services
Getting operational capability right
means better quality services, more output for the same or lower
cost, and improved outcomes for the people who rely on them,
which is why the NAO has focused on four key capabilities
government organisations need to learn for smarter
delivery.
The
capabilities:
-
Taking a whole-system
approach: Dealing
with complexity and uncertainty by understanding how the
different parts of the system work, what service users' needs
are, and how processes connect.
-
Understand and deal with demand:
Designing and running services in a
way that provides people with what they want, when they want
it, and get it right the first time.
-
Use information to improve:
Working to understand how services
are performing, and use that information to decide what to
change, why, and how.
-
Have a systematic approach to innovation and
improvement: Knowing where
problems happen or where there are opportunities to
improve.
Government's approach to
building operational
capability
The Operational Delivery Profession
(ODP) is the largest profession in the UK Civil Service, playing
a vital role in the day-to-day delivery of public services.
Professions focus on developing the capabilities of staff, with
profession-specific skills, and providing them with career
development opportunities.
It has over 290,000 members, more than
half of the entire civil service workforce. ODP's roles span a
wide range of services, including processing benefit claims,
issuing passports, managing prisons, handling planning
applications, and working at the UK
border.
Looking to the future, the ODP's new
strategy recognises that the skills required by operational
delivery professionals are evolving. Operational management
knowledge, such as how to resource to meet supply and demand, and
how to design and manage services for work to flow smoothly and
achieve high throughput, is still required, but people also need
to know how to use that expertise in a digital service operating
context - for example via using artificial intelligence, and
developing user-friendly apps.
ENDS
Notes to editors
Press notices and reports are
available from the date of publication on the NAO website. Hard
copies can be obtained by using the relevant links on our
website.
-
This 'plan for change' sets out a
renewed focus on reforming government operations, improving
infrastructure, and meeting national priorities like Net Zero,
economic growth, and public service
transformation.
