The boss of an environmental consultancy firm has said public sector job losses in Wales could be significantly reduced if organisations affected by the cuts took control of their utility and energy costs.
Andrew Diplock, the commercial director of Utility and Environmental Solutions, based in Ystrad Mynach, said public sector organisations could save money by having a coordinated approach to buying their energy.
His comments follow those of Sir Philip Green, the billionaire retailer, who said if he ran his business the way the government does “the lights would go out”.
Mr Diplock, who is also chair of Caerphilly Business Forum, said: “We’ve seen at firsthand how public sector organisations can miss out on savings by having an uncoordinated and inconsistent approach to energy procurement
“But there is no need for it. Large corporations have similar challenges to the public sector but businesses are often more open in their approach – more proactive in identifying such problems and they don’t hesitate to sort them out.
“One of our private sector clients, Wales and West Utilities, is probably comparable in size to some of the public sector organisations in Wales. We’ve worked with them for four years to help manage their utility procurement, carbon impact reduction and bill validation and already saved them more than £2 million. But they are a forward thinking company and used to a great deal of accountability.”
There are organisations in the public sector that have taken a similar approach, said Mr Diplock, but they were relatively few.
He said: “Portsmouth Highbury College opted out of their public sector energy procurement agreement, as they saw the opportunity to make valuable savings with us. We provided a detailed review of their utility procurement and ongoing management, and soon delivered savings of almost a quarter of a million pounds. That may be somewhere in the region of a dozen or more salaries in a typical public sector organisation or to put it in the currency of the moment, a dozen people whose jobs may be saved in the forthcoming round of public spending cuts.
“And if you took the £2 million savings we made for Wales and West Utilities and reproduced that across the public sector in Wales – the local authorities, health services, schools, colleges etc – we could be saving thousands of jobs here alone.”