By David Hargreaves
Labour makes it bigger, National makes it smaller.
The expanding then contracting size of the state - as well as all its employees and offices, has been a well traversed path through history.
Yes, the state tends to get bigger with Labour and smaller with National.
No big surprise then that the current National Government has unleashed a strategy aimed at reducing what might once have been known as the "property" the state occupies but that buzz-language now dictates be known as its "footprint".
At the moment it is a fairly big hobnail-booted footprint, as the recently released Crown Office Estate report - the second such one of what is now an annual series - shows.
As of June 30 last year (it's for the 2012 year but has only just been released by the Government), the crown occupied 1,669,392 sq m of "footprint" and it paid NZ$324 million in rent. Some 25% of the property occupied was state owned.
That's down from 1,720,527 sq m of property and rent of NZ$326 million of rent the year before.
The Government points out that the 51,135 sq m reduction in space during the year equated to three large Treasury-sized buildings.
Interestingly though, the number of people occupied in these premises has actually risen from 60,600 to 61,128, though an explantory note says this increase "can be attributed to agency understanding of the definition of who should be included".
State Services Minister Jonathan Coleman in releasing both the latest Crown Office Estate report and a new Government National Property Strategy and Principles document last week talked about reducing the "occupied footprint" by about 25% over the next three years and producing annual savings of around NZ$110 million.
Coleman said that savings made through the co-location of similar agencies and shared use of some facilities would also have the added benefit of making it easier for people to access government services.
One of the goals of the new strategy is to ensure an average office accommodation density of 13–14 square metres per person by 2019.
The Crown Office Estate report talked about a current "expectation" of 12-16 sq metres per person - and went on to say that the "majority" of goverment agencies were outside of this though in the past year "no accommodation transactions have been undertaken that have resulted in an increase in the average sq m per agency".
The figures in the report show that the state employees with the most room are those at the ministry of Maori development, Te Puni Kokiri - with over 30 sq m per person.
The most compact (or is that compacted?) staff are those at the Earthquake Commission, who have but 10 sq m per person to swing a cat in. The average square metre per person, bearing in mind that this applies to state services operations both in the metropolitan and regional areas, was 20.5 sq m, down from 21.5 sq m a year earlier.
The agency with the biggest "footprint" is the Ministry of Justice, with not far short of 250,000 sq m, followed not far behind by the Ministry of Social Development and then some way further back, New Zealand Police.
The average square metre cost remained static last year at NZ$259 sq m. But there are significant differences within the state sector on costs per square metre depending on where operations are located.
The Serious Fraud Office, which works in close proximity to the white collar people it attempts to apprehend, and therefore has offices in Auckland's Queen Street, pays over NZ$600 sq m for its accommodation. At the other end of the scale is the department that might end up handling some of the SFO's "clients". The Department of Corrections pays less than NZ$150 sq m.
Not surprisingly then the SFO also has the most expensive people in terms of the per-person cost of rentals. The SFO people come in at around NZ$15,000 per year in terms of their accommodation cost.
Meanwhile the Earthquake Commission folk, as well as taking up the least amount of space, are also costing the least, at something over NZ$3000 per person per year to be accommodated.
The average cost per person across the whole state service is NZ$5316, down from NZ$5564 the previous year.
The report says that comparison with the private sector shows that the cost per workstation in the public sector is now equivalent to the average for "Grade C" accommodation in the private sector - the other grades being B, A and "Premium Grade".
"In terms of office density it shows that the gap between the government and private sector densities is closing, although government generally occupies more space per person than the private sector," the report says.
"A reduction in our occupancy density will result in significant savings and this will be addressed using new ways of working as opportunities arise within agencies or between agencies to restack or refit thier office spaces."
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