Now that we are over halfway through the financial year, more and more councils are revisiting plans they have made to generate efficiency savings to see if they will stack up and achieve their desired outcome for this year and beyond.

At APSE, we have noticed an upsurge in enquiries about how you make remaining services more commercially viable by either reducing costs or generating additional revenue to offset budget cuts. This suggests that councils are concerned they may fail to meet existing targets and are attempting a ‘take two’.

Took part in Guardian online debate today on managing parks and green spaces despite the budget cuts and with over 100 posts in two hours it was a lively debate.

I pushed the APSE line about whilst we disagree with the cuts we recognise that they are happening and therefore we need to find ways to stop services from imploding. The only response is to seek efficiency, generate additional income and innovate.

Spoke today at APSE's Northern symposium on 'Avoiding the road to nowhere' at Formby Hall.

This was the latest event in our roadshow on discussing with our membership the financial challenges they face and debating some of the solutions around efficiency, income generation and innovation.

Busy couple of days in London, where I attended a couple of conferences and had several meetings.

The first event was 'The Public Sector Efficiency Expo', where I almost seen Francis Maude outline the coalition Government's policy on Public Services.

Mad dash around London today for a series of meetings aimed at developing a couple of research projects that APSE is keen to undertake on green jobs and service delivery.

The blows just keep on coming, it seems. A recent report claiming council managers are unproductive is the latest in the drip, drip, drip attack on public servants already facing slashed budgets, frozen pay and pension cuts.

Progressive austerity appears to be the message on public finances for the foreseeable future. In local government this translates to reducing costs or cutting services in order to pay for the sins of the bankers.

For those who have been in local government over the last few decades this is not exactly a new phenomenon. From the mid-1970s onwards every few years another government financial crisis appears, often originating from another source; from the International Monetary Fund intervention to CCT and from Black Wednesday to Gershon. 
 

I was quite surprised in more ways than one at the weekend to read the Chief Executive of the Audit Commission, Steve Bundred's comments suggesting a pay freeze for public sector workers as an answer to the current gap in public sector finances.