I am pleased to see my long standing interest in the collapsing productivity of the UK public sector has now become a central government preoccupation . They are right that the public accounts have been driven out of balance by a £40 bn loss of productivity since 2019. There are things they can do to wrestle it back.
They should start with a freeze on all external recruitment of people other than medics, teachers and uniformed personnel,This would slim staff numbers by around 7% a year, or 140,000 posts. Ministers should have the power to approve outside appointees where there is a bad skills shortage in the public sector.
Abolishing NHS England can help if good decisions are made about how much is still run from the centre and by whom in the Health Department. Saving 9000 posts if they do achieve that is small in a service employing more than 1.5 million full time equivalents. If they are getting rid of senior managers redundancies can be costly and are upsetting to some who stay as well as to those who are fired.
Sir Kier talks about deregulating and stripping out unwanted independent bodies. The Lord Chancellor had the perfect chance this week to get rid of the Sentencing Council when she said she disagreed with its most recent report and decisions. Her failure to back a Conservative amendment to the law to sort this out shows this policy has yet to embed in government actions.
March 17, 2025
Productivity requires individuals of ability, specific to the task, equiped with the best tools, and incentivised to produce the best outcomes.
You cannot expect to achieve it with a CS, however intelligent and well educated, in many cases politicised, who have little management experience in their operational area. In extremisving, you would not want anyone from NHS England removing your appendix. Private industry does not operate on this casual basis and is productive. Were it not it would not be long in business.
Writen before reading your submission, which I will now do.
March 17, 2025
NHS England may be cancelled but what’s the betting overall numbers don’t decrease. Our local trust is still advertising for a diversity advisor despite Streeting banning them. Politicians have no control over their departments and this is a hangover from EU membership.
HMRC continue working from home along with the DVLA and offer an abysmal service. The unions will fight any reduction in head count tooth and nail.
March 17, 2025
Indeed scrap all DEI lunacy and recruit the best on merit it will save lives. Scrap the mad net zero agenda in the NHS to and the lunacy of electric ambulances, fire engines and the like (they do not even save any CO2 and are far less efficient.
March 17, 2025
“The unions will fight any reduction in head count tooth and nail”
Which is, unfortunately in many ways, why it’s probably easier for Labour to do this than the Conservatives.
Streeting at least talks a good game, unlike most ministers for the last 8 or so years and most of his colleagues. 9000 may be small vs 1.5million in the NHS but it at least shows steps in a good direction of travel
March 17, 2025
We’ve been here before, it’s tedious and meaningless.
The state does not concern itself with spending money wisely nor does it concern itself with extracting the max benefit from limited resources. Its primary concern is increasing and expanding its powers to and embedding its parasitism. The idea that this entity concerns itself with respecting the private taxpayer is palpable nonsense.
A government either declares war (DOGE) against the state or it shuts the hell up.
March 17, 2025
Much truth in this.
March 17, 2025
Absolutely right !
March 17, 2025
Sir Kier has shown himself to be Two Tier Kier yet again by failing to abolish the sentencing council by not backing the Tory amendment.
Sir Keir Starmer has announced plans to scrap one quango – after the Government he heads created 27 in eight months.
Much of the state sector does nothing of value anyway & much of what they do of negative value just inconveniencing the productive and creating essentially parasitic jobs in compliance etc.
March 17, 2025
@LifeLogic – it goes further in the media yesterday “the Tories(what ever they are nowadays) accused Governmet unpicking Brexit by the back door’ by getting rid of law which would end supremacy of EU rules in UK”
So TwoTierKier denies the UK its own ‘legislators’ and has maintained the EU as the UK’s Law giver.
March 17, 2025
First thing to do is fire all the people in the state sector who do nothing useful or do positive harm prob. circa 50% of them. All the net zero ones, the climate change committee, road blockers, DEI people, daft red tape pushers… release them to get real jobs pay real taxes and stop inconveniencing the productive ones.
March 17, 2025
Absurd delays at the land registry costing me money by delaying a transaction currently. Further delays at the probate office and HMRC.
March 17, 2025
We can be pretty certain that these delays are being caused by working from home, not a reduced number of staff.
The whole idea of civil servants working from home needs to be abandoned. Any that refuse to come into the office five days a week can leave which will reduce civil service numbers anyway.
March 17, 2025
Local authorities are very efficient when sending council tax bills. From April 1st the government has allowed them to double council tax on second homes and furnished lettings?, as well as increasing by 5%.
I have been refurbishing a 4 bedroom house which was let to 2 persons [maximum allowed] who painted bedrooms dark blue, broke flooring tiles and let the garden turn into a jungle. From April I am being charged £4800 pa which is as much as a person pays in rent. I have tried to phone to tell them I’m not letting any more but they only work from home 10am to 4pm and are under a heavy workload when not taking g the dog out. Unfortunately I can’t sell it without paying 150k CGT, which will be claimed by highly productive HMRC staff who go through the transfer records.
March 17, 2025
Labour is backward.
Much of the time, Labour government ‘productivity’ could be more accurately summed up with antonyms, such as: futile, ineffective, pointless, unprofitable, fruitless, useless and worthless.
March 17, 2025
Not just worthless often actively damaging and counterproductive – road blocking, net zero, buring wood chips at Drax, concreting up fracking sites, pushing heat pumps and EVs… the list is endless.
March 17, 2025
I suppose the fact that Labour is starting to “talk the talk” on shrinking the Quangocracy and Civil Service is an improvement, but I have minimal confidence that they’ll actually DO anything meaningful.
I believe the ONLY reason they are scrapping NHS England and placing the health service “under democratic control again” (Two-Tier’s words) is so that they can most effectively weaponise it again at the next General Election with a slogan along the lines of “Three Weeks to Save the NHS” and by claiming that the Reform Party wants to privatise it, American-style …. when they have consistently said that is not the policy and it would remain free at the point of delivery.
If they were genuinely trying to shrink the Quangocracy and Civil Service there are a great many other options which could be implemented and produce savings, as well as bring decision-making back “under democratic control,” far more quickly.
March 17, 2025
Indeed.
March 17, 2025
The downside of them taking the NHS under direct political control (actually under Civil Service control because there’s only a handful of elected politicians in the Department of Health) is that if/when things don’t improve the politicians will be held directly responsible because there’s no-one left to blame.
March 17, 2025
@Donna – this century has seen the Uniparty ‘talk’ a good-talk on the growth of this taxpayer funded Bureaucracy and each time they have grown it instead. We have 600 unelected unaccountable quango’s that rule the UK that’s a 50% growth in the last 10 years alone. This century includes the likes of the OBR, the ONS and the BoE, have any of them improved out comes for the People during that time? But, the People, the Taxpayer have had their wallets emptied regardless. The only thing they can show is greater costs to the taxpayer.
They wont go away as the logical suspicion there are a lot of ‘free-loaders’ in Parliament that are looking for their next free-loading job when their electorate says enough-is-enough.
March 17, 2025
‘If they were … far more quickly’: What are these great many other options to be implemented to produce savings and quickly bring decision-making back under democratic control?
March 17, 2025
Not wishing to seem biased without giving a fair chance to the NHS England proposal, but will this be just shifting deck chairs, and a David Cameron type of ‘bonfire of the quango’s’, sort of non-existent.
The nature of the beast, i.e Labour, are very much in favour of politicised services and that hinders just as much as having a long chain of highly paid rubber stamp bods on the states payroll.
With in-laws all in the public service sector, and immediate family in NHS I hear about the long chain of those paid to sit and wait for a piece of paper to rubber stamp and how it holds up the productivity.
The new ‘must have’ being DEI which is downright ridiculous and, I’m told ,is also having a workload increase for those in management that has nothing of value to the service they are supposed to be providing.
It is also adding an air of suspicion and fear in the work place!! That can’t be a good thing for productivity either surely.
We will see exactly how much fat Labour intends to trim off, but I cannot see them going against their political ideology so this may be a limited exercise with limited results.
March 17, 2025
Senior Quango manager who are made redundant will appear again in other NHS positions as consultants.
Their redundancy payments should be contingent on not being able to work in the NHS for 3 -5 years.
The redundancy payments must also be the statutory minimum which is notice plus only £700 per week redundancy payment.
March 17, 2025
There has been somewhat of a renaissance of steelmaking at Sheffield Forgemasters, which was bought by the Ministry of Defence in 2021. They are building two new plants, one of which will include the country’s largest machining hall. Forgemasters currently has the capacity for pouring the largest single casting (570 tonnes) in Europe. Two new forging presses will exert a pressure of 4,500 tonnes and 10,000 tonnes respectively on a billet of steel
Sheffield Forgemasters will use the facility, near Meadowhall, to support manufacturing for defence programmes – producing forgings for large calibre gun barrels
The new main building will be 32m tall and cover a space equal to 12 Olympic swimming pools. A second, smaller building will house a facility for testing products and a dedicated training area for new engineers, creating highly-skilled people for decades to come
Forgemasters’ new plant will also be able to produce complex nuclear-grade components more efficiently. During the mid 2020s, Forgemasters started using a new electron beam-based welding process that reduced the timescale involved in the construction of compact nuclear reactors from 150 days to two hours
March 17, 2025
Ironically, this Labour government has more chance of improving productivity than the prvious Conservative government.
The media is giving some room for Labour to get this done. If the Conservatives had tried it there wouid have been constant leaks against any cuts and regular accusations of bullying by ministers.
March 17, 2025
I really have no idea whether or not abolition of NHS England will be a good move. On the government’s own figures it is not going to make much cost difference. I note that there is still no English government.
March 17, 2025
Sir John
“good decisions are made about how much is still run from the centre”
As with everything if you want results, real results, good results how things are done/run should be at the end where the delivery is made.
Politicians are there to indicate a direction – no more. Centralization causes the worst of all Worlds ‘a one size fits all’ approach. Hence, we are littered with administrators that don’t ‘do’, the Quango, it is now a block on the delivery of how and what the Taxpayer money is spent on. These wayward bodies, without democratic responsible or accountability are no more than an entity to impose someone’s ‘personal choice’ on a ‘whole’ society regardless of if it being appropriate in each and every situation.
The obvious out of step cartel is the administration bodies running the NHS. Smaller clinically lead units with the administrators doing what is required by the clinicians and the local needs would be an instant uplift in supplying a professional service.
The barrier to getting things everywhere back on an even keel is that the top-down control is now so embedded entrenched in our systems that those that have been given their above ability positions are so intertwined in politics they are strong enough to fight any roll-back to sanity.
We need a strong ‘working for and with’ the people style government. Not an absentee government working for these bodies that have taken Parliaments decision making away from accountability and responsibility.
Sir John I would guess that the suggested £40billion is well less than half of the wasted taxpayer money that is being lost to the unaccountable ‘free-loaders’ in society
March 17, 2025
By now we should be able to recognize what the government will do from what they say, when they say they are going to do something positive about productivity or waste we know the opposite will occur.
The only plans labour are instigating are destructive ones, to reduce demand on food and industrial goods. As farms go out of business what will happen about the empty supermarket shelves? Will we import more to increase our debt levels?
Labour have failed so many times in the past to make the economy work – this current administration has well exceeded their efforts but this time it is calculated and deliberate.
Today many chat rooms have closed down due to oppressive legislation against freedom of speech. The fallen productivity of the public sector will soon become irrelevant as we move closer to the end game. It should be obvious by now that HMG is the worst treacherous enemy we ever had.
March 17, 2025
Occasionally you see a commentator pointing out the break in economic growth rate around 2008 and attributing that to the effects on the Global Financial Crisis, but I am increasingly convinced that the real cause is a radical shift in the government’s priorities from traditional economic growth in the UK expressed as GDP denominated in sterling to saving the whole planet from overheating. That shift started in the years before 2008 as our political class accepted that “the science is settled” and we are now facing “a climate emergency” but found its clearest expression in the Act passed in that year with the almost unanimous support of MPs. If the government’s top priority is saving the planet then the reduction in trend annual rate of growth of UK GDP from 2.7% to 1.1% can be viewed as a sacrifice worth making, but there is the problem that apparently nobody has explained this properly to Rachel Reeves or the OBR and all the others who are stuck in the old rut of focussing on GDP and revenue and expenditure in sterling. One way out of this bind would be to have a parallel carbon credit budget alongside the sterling budget, with for example welfare payments made in sterling issued by the Bank of England being supplemented by payments of carbon credits issued by a UK Bank of the Environment.
March 17, 2025
We can’t believe a word of what the PM says. I doubt scrapping NHS England will lead to many jobs going, just an increase in headcount at the Department of Health.
Wes Streeting seems ineffective. He says don’t employ any more DEI staff, and NHS Trusts continue doing so.
Why has he not sacked the Chief Executives of those Trusts that ignore him?
Until he sacks Ed Miliband and dumps the Net Zero nonsense, the UK will continue to grow poorer. Today the PM can faff about tinkering at the edges, but the UK economy will soon be so bad it will force him to cut Civil Service jobs and Quangos. If you don’t make decisions when you have a choice, you will be forced to make decisions you don’t like or don’t want to make!
March 17, 2025
I don’t believe the red side of the Uniparty wants to improve productivity any more than the blue side wants to reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands”.
They’re not in control anyway. The old adage that “it doesn’t matter for whom you vote the government always gets in” is now “it doesn’t matter for whom you vote the bureaucracy comprising of the Civil Service, quangos, NGOs, regulators, “charities”, academia, czars and the judiciary are now making our laws and policies”.
And to quote Robert Conquest’s second and third laws of politics:
1) Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
2) The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it led by a cabal of its enemies.
March 17, 2025
Is the large fall in productivity attributable to a substantial increase in staffing? If so, how was such increase ever permitted (what work were people recruited to perform?) and if not woulld not a recruitment freeze and any other head-count or wages reduction measures risk just manipullating the numbers whilst leaving the causes unaddressed?
March 17, 2025
Good morning.
Getting rid of NHS England is just Labour clearing out Tory appointees. As for the rest, I guess it is all just a tip of the iceberg but magnified to look like they are doing something, just like the deportations of some illegals.
March 17, 2025
Very successful entrepreneurs like Bezos and Musk have stopped remote working in their organisations.
Musk as head of DOGE is intending government employees who do not turn up for work five days a week to
be put on administrative leave. Either the inference is that Bezos and Musk are unnecessarily hard taskmasters or that they have noted a relationship between remote working and reduced productivity. Civil servants therefore do not need to scratch their heads about the fall off in their own productivity because smarter men have already worked it out. Therefore the onus is now on Starmer to put the necessary reforms into effect without delay other than that caused by a shortage of currently available office space.