The Institute of Management Services [IMS] has consistently drawn to the attention of Her Majesty’s Government [HMG] the need to improve productivity in the Public Sector.

The forthcoming Spending Review will involve more than the allocation of resources. As well as taking the steps needed to reduce Britain’s record deficit and restore sound public finances, the Spending Review will consider how to deliver a step change in public sector productivity and value for money and set out a long-term vision for public services.

This presents the Coalition Government with a challenging and urgent task to decide where reductions in public spending should lie. Alongside the Spending challenge websites, through which over 100,000 ideas from individuals on how we get more from less, the Government has organised a series of visits and seminars to discuss and debate various aspects of public spending.

As part of the process the Chief Secretary to the Treasury extended an invitation to the IMS to attend the Spending Review Engagement process event at Reading Town Hall on the 31^st August.

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Harry Downes, FMS in his role of President of the E I I E [European Institute of Industrial Engineers] was invited to attend a conference, hosted by the European Federation of Productivity Services, which was held over three days at LINDAU.

The conference is an annual event, which celebrates the success of the E I E (European Industrial Engineer) qualifying for their Instutute membership. One hundred and twenty students attended the conference, which acts as part of their professional career development. The conference theme centred on “productivity improvements” in Eastern Europe, which included a very interesting case study from the Audi company based in Hungary. The final afternoon included a visit to a very modern factory specialising in commercial, industrial and household lighting. The whole of the mechanisation and factory layout was based on using MTM techniques.

Hard to fill vacancies predicted to stunt economic growth, warn industry experts

Skills shortages in the manufacturing and engineering sectors could endanger the country’s economic recovery and even lead to companies going out of business, industry figures have warned

Companies have told us that hard-to-fill vacancies are holding back their growth, said Professor John Bryson, chair of enterprise and economic geography at the University of Birmingham, which has just published research on the threat of skills shortages in the UK manufacturing industry.

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