Alexander Stevenson

Despite being four years into a recently-unprecedented period of fiscal austerity, according to government plans we are still less than halfway through the cuts. Borrowing is still expected to be at historically high levels of £100bn this year. The OBR has already warned that this scale of cuts would take spending on public services to levels, as a share of national income, lower than at any point since at least 1948. Is the public sector just an easy target? Is the success of the UK’s Coalition Government economic policy measured by how many jobs it creates in the private sector and how many jobs it cuts in the public sector? The private sector, we are told, will lead us out of recession. The private sector will create the jobs required to fund the public services we need. This, however, hints of an anomaly: on the one hand not only is public sector management harder to do well than private sector management, but in most instances, it is more important for us that it is done well. Is the government missing a trick? Alexander Stevenson will attempt to explore this view as well as exploring what, in his experience, the public sector can teach the private sector.

Alexander co-founded Rse Consulting, a public sector consultancy specialising in strategic services for local government. In 2008 he sold Rse Consulting to Tribal group and continued there for a year as Director for Local Government specialising in supporting public sector organisations to work effectively in partnership and cut costs. Alex has since published a book entitled ‘The Public Sector: Managing the Unmanageable’, offering a rare insight for public sector managers on how to develop techniques to deal with the challenges they face.