How the City of Utrecht achieved major budget savings through innovative service reviews

Performance indicators

Within a timeframe of six months, the corporate and service review was executed. Under the central coordination of the Review Director, eleven reviews were carried out. During the process around one hundred public officers were involved (around ninety experts in the review teams and a dozen department directors). The process resulted in eleven individual review reports (these are publicly assessable, just google: “doorlichtingsrapport Utrecht”), which contained statements about performance, efficiency and saving potential.

From the library review, for example, it became clear that the performance level varied. Compared to top-performing libraries in The Netherlands, the Utrecht library had limited members and visitors (effectivity) and higher staff costs (efficiency); but also a larger collection with more loans per member (effectivity) and lower costs for housing and media (efficiency). Given the local ambitions and the need to modernise the library, three reform measures were proposed by the review team, providing a structural savings potential of €0.5m:

1. More business-like management, like the proactive management of cost reduction and increasing of incomes;
2. Concentration of library locations, reducing fourteen average-performing locations to five high-performing locations with better services;
3. Privatising the library services in a foundation.

In total, the thorough review reports (averaging fifty-two pages) contained thirty-two specific measures brought together in an overall concluding report by the Review Director. These thirty-two austerity measures can be divided into effectivity-oriented measures and efficiency gains. Five measures were oriented at effectivity - for example, reconsideration of social policies in the review of social care. However, the most measures, twenty-seven, were oriented at improving the efficiency of the administration and its activities - for example, by digitizing service in the review of public services, or the adoption of business-like management in the library.