Managing Demand: Building Future Public Services

This report looks at the financial case for demand management, from emerging evidence from small-scale interventions to early findings from ‘whole place’ approaches. While the evidence base is nascent, Managing Demand argues that the financial case is strong enough for local authorities to prioritise strategic - rather than piecemeal - demand management.

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Public services face unprecedented challenges. Rising demand, changing demographics and increasingly stretched finances mean that the choice for local authorities and public service providers is stark: change the way they work, or face the possibility of service retrenchment, increasing irrelevance and perpetual crisis management.

This report recommends the following:

• Ongoing work will be needed to build the evidence base as projects mature, particularly in relation to the financial case, and also to enable public service bodies to learn from each other’s examples.