With European Elections illustrating a general shift to the right, it places the Conservative Party in the UK in a very strong position for the General Election pencilled in for June 2010.  It’s been suggested that, if elected, the Party will abandon shared services and opt for outsourcing Finance and HR instead.  Conservative minister Francis Maude said the party believes that outsourcing is a better way of making essential efficiency savings.  Labour’s Chancellor Alistair Darling has always been pro shared services and stated in the last Budget that the government would aim for £15bn in efficiencies from back-office functions by introducing more shared services.  It now looks like this plan hangs in the balance. 

The view in the Conservative Party  suggests that by outsourcing back-office functions, you are more likely to have a better results.  “If shared services are started and run in-house, you will always have turf difficulties over who will run it.  But if functions are outsourced, the turf difficulties get removed and you are more likely to have a better outcome in terms of getting more for less,” said Franicis Maude speaking to Personnel Today. Maude said that shared services is not the obvious answer for efficiencies and that the Department for Transport’s shared services attempt that actually cost more than it saved.   Senior civil servants in the past have admitted that shared services can take a long time to adopt in the public sector and in contrast, outsourcing companies have claimed that it can take half the time to establish an outsourced operation.  Capgemini’s head of public sector outsourcing, Bob Scott, said outsourcing could be set up within a year of the Conservatives coming to power.  The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) was less convinced by the Tories’ proposal and said that there is plenty of evidence that outsourcing actually disappoints in savings.

With thanks to www.publicservice.co.uk