Getting better value from public sector research ... - CentreForum

Getting better value from Public Sector Research Establishments
to government, either through broadening their client bases,
as seen with BRE and TRL on flat or declining revenues, or
through significant expansion as in the case of LGC and
QinetiQ.
Clearly the privatised bodies are likely to find it less of a
challenge to weather the current decline in government
funding. We would expect that continuing funding pressures,
combined with their high reliance on one customer, will pose
significant challenges in the next year or so for government
owned and operated PSREs as well as for GOCOs.
Public Sector Operational Constraints
There has long been recognition that structural, procedural
and cultural constraints have a significant impact on
performance and value for money within the public sector.
Various mechanisms have been used over the years to
make it easier for the parts of government with executive
functions to have greater freedom to operate. These include
the frameworks and structures used for Executive Agencies
and Trading Funds. In addition, the operation of many parts
of government has been outsourced in GOCO arrangements,
and we have seen that this applies to three of the PSREs
studied here.
However, none of the above arrangements fully succeeds
in removing all the constraints that are part and parcel of
government ownership and scrutiny. These factors appear
to have constrained the performance of all the government
owned PSREs in this study. Some of the constraints are
removed or alleviated in the case of GOCOs, which are able
to draw in wider private sector expertise to help address
some of the performance and cultural issues.
These are some of the constraints of government ownership
which come out in the case studies:
:
Speed of Decision Making – It seems to take much
longer for key decisions to get made in government than
in the private sector. For example, it took two years for
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