The Financial Management Award Shortlist

Spending Wisely Team, Department for Work and Pensions

During 2010/11, the DWP implemented a series of initiatives to drive down its discretionary costs. This is defined as expenditure which does not directly affect staff levels or customer services, e.g. staff travel and expenses, office services, postage.

•    Desktops and Associated Services costs cut by £10m, mainly through reducing workstations from 130k to 118k at a faster rate than staff reductions.
•    Mobile devices reviewed to ensure that non-essential items were surrendered. This resulted in 20 per cent of mobile phones and 26 per cent of 3G cards.
•    Business travel and meetings targeted to cut costs, reduce the carbon footprint, exploit technology and improve work/life balance. Business travel costs fell by nearly 33 per cent or £17m with First Class travel being severely reduced and then removed. Meeting costs fell by nearly 80 per cent or over £14m and hotel charges dropped by 41 per cent or £4.8m as contracts were renegotiated and usage fell.
•    Energy consumption was a significant success with use being reduced despite a cold December. DWP energy consumption fell from 520m kWh to 466m kWh while CO2 emissions reduced from 213k tonnes to 185k tonnes – the largest absolute reduction in central government.
•    Savings of £10m by drastically reducing the number of printers and making monochrome printing the norm.

Changes were deployed throughout the year with the pace accelerating as the programme gathered momentum so some of the savings will only be fully realised during 2011/12. However, even after taking this into consideration the end result was that discretionary costs reduced by around £130m or 47 per cent in 2010/11 compared to the previous reporting period.