Government must learn lessons to get value for money from public spending

03.03.2009

Although much learning in government takes place after large projects and initiatives and even crises, important learning should also take place routinely on a daily basis as work is carried out or as a result of research and evaluations. This should include feedback from service users if service delivery is to improve.

Successful learning means changing the approach to work of many organisations in the public sector. Departments fail to learn if they have ineffective tools to capture and share learning, if they do not share new information and insights across the whole organisation, if they suffer from high staff turnover leading to loss of knowledge or if they have insufficient time to capture lessons from experience.

Departments should give higher priority to learning within their organisations and more incentives should be offered to staff to encourage them to spend more time learning from their work. Staff need to have the opportunity to consider in detail why projects went well or not and to suggest new ideas. Evaluation of projects should be more systematic and learning should be built into staff appraisal and reward schemes.

Support and guidance to staff is available from the Cabinet Office, HM Treasury and other government departments and units, so much so that staff are often confused as to who to approach.

Tim Burr, head of the National Audit Office, said,"We know from our audit work that projects and programmes are more likely to succeed and keep to time and budget where lessons have been learned and experience shared. Departments need to take learning more seriously and encourage their staff to give it higher priority through better recognition in reward and appraisal structures. Getting better at learning from the past  will help government secure better value for money in the future."

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