Facts4eu sent out a good note highlighting the productivity collapse in the public sector. Productivity is now 8.5% down on six years ago. The government needs to reverse this quickly, as it is making public services unaffordable to taxpayers.
As someone who has led parts of the public sector as a Councillor with Council Executive responsibilities and as a Minister I know the need to work with the staff and system to get better performance. As a former Chairman of two international industrial businesses I know what you can achieve with the right approach and key staff.
The first thing for the public sector to grasp is quality and productivity are two sides of the same coin. An efficiency drive must not be cost cutting above quality of service. It must be better and smarter working, mindful of the needs and views of staff.
Put in a quality system. Get things right first time to save duplication of effort and more complaints. Fix things that go wrong as soon as they are identified. Manage error out by changing approach when a series of errors emerges. Keep service design and delivery straightforward and easy to understand. Reward staff that do well. Make managers experience what staff have to do. Dont put off serving a user. That means you need more than one contact, a holding reply followed by the reply or action. Don’t allow backlogs to build.
As Chairman I always asked to see the complaints. They present opportunities . They reveal what is wrong that needs fixing. Remedy something well for someone you have messed up can create a more loyal customer. They see they matter. Listen to customers or service users, as it is their needs that give you a job. Design a service they want, not one that is convenient for the provider.
I would be happy to help the public sector be better for both employees and users. Like productivity and quality they go together to create success.
January 10, 2025
Good morning.
Alas, yesterday one of my elderly neighbours had to go back into hospital, which will be the third time in six weeks. They missed the fact that she had a compound fracture from a fall she had, and issues with her blood. She will now have to go through the same routine as before.
This is EXACTLY how I think. In a previous job as a manager I would often would have to deal with what I called, ‘Customer Issues’. I never referred to them as complaints as this had a negative connotation. We had a three step process.
1) Listen.
2) Ask questions.
3) Go and fix it.
The company I was then working for was providing a service. A service which people were paying for. And not only that, I realised that these customers had the power of CHOICE !! They chose to come to me and not anywhere else. This I valued. That is why I so firmly believe in competition, those that don’t care soon go to the wall. I call it, “Economic Darwinism” Not so much the survival of the fittest, but the less stupid !
We need CHOICE in the Public Sector. Hence why I keep banging on about allowing companies the ability to offer private Health Care as a non-taxable benefit. This and other reforms would make our healthcare much better.
January 10, 2025
@Mark B. +1. Choice is vital.
Our kind host mentioned creating “a loyal customer”. Our public services don’t need ’em. We are users, not customers. We are trapped. There is no “leave it” option from “take it or leave it”. Many essentials can’t be procured elsewhere (driving licence, planning consent, land registration etc the list is endless) and most of us can’t afford a private alternative when it exists.
Until there is choice, we won’t get any significant improvement.
January 10, 2025
John, I’ve just been reading about the private members bill introduced by the Greens. Climate and Nature.
It’s supported by a large number of MPs and if passed will decimate this country.
It’s intention is to count the carbon footprint of all imports and exports and reduce them by 75% thereby outlawing most agriculture, aviation and shipping. As the American banks are pulling out of the climate scam, is it to much to expect the same here thus stunting this eco nonesense
January 10, 2025
3 Take action (not necessarily fix it as one person’s complaint may be acceptable or preferred by 99%). The customer always has a viewpoint but is not always right.
January 10, 2025
@Mark B; Yours is a cheap shot at the NHS, the private health providers also get it wrong, often leaving the NHS to deal with their mess; my own father died early because a private provider missed the true site of the cancer causing a positive blood test. Having ripped out a (on biopsy) perfectly healthy major organ, by the time the true nature of the cancer was found the totally unnecessary surgery had allowed the cancer to spread to an inoperable party of the body – it was the NHS who had to, first, try and deal with a now out of control primary cancerous growth and then provide palliative care. I also knew a lady who went private, for a hip replacement, when a post op infection took hold she was transferred to the care of NHS.
Both my father and that other person had CHOICE, or did they, anymore than Mr Hobson had a choice, given the under-funding of the NHS in the last 45 years, and before someone suggests “record” funding, is that figure adjusted for inflation of not… 😡
January 10, 2025
Electricity demand just under 46gw. Wind supplying 7.3% and we’re Importing 13% of demand. Where is Milibrain these days, just one fault from massive power cuts and they want 1.5 million new all electric homes, 600,000 heat pumps installed annually and we all have electric cars.
We can’t manage now, let alone after all the new eco nonesense. Trump please send in the Marines.
January 10, 2025
Dare I say it “ the old school of thought” , it worked exceedingly well in my day , why not now?
Probably because the reds think they have won! Well possibly the skirmish but not the battle. So pack up your laptops and get back to WORk guys and gals.
January 10, 2025
Have the right people running the organisation. Don’t let political patronage determine who gets the job. Remove sinecure roles and departments. They give a bad example to other employees and add nothing.
You cannot have ‘a quality system’ with the wrong people at the top. They will hide weakness to cover their own backs.
All too often those who are sacked from one leadership role in public enterprises turn up in another – NHS, local councils etc, etc.
January 10, 2025
SIr John’s prescription sounds like what I was trying to get managers to do as a consultant in both private industry and the public sector for years in the late 1990’s and 2000’s, sometimes with great success. There is a key difference between the two sectors. If people – nearly all naturally resistant to change – ultimately won’t change, despite re-training, support, counselling etc – you terminate their employment. That is extremely difficult in the public sector. In industry you don’t get stuck with problem people as you sometimes do in the public sector. In the public sector you can move them sideways or, if you’re lucky, the majority will carry them, bypassing them in key processes. Either way overall productivity does not increase as much as it could because the dead wood still has to be carried even if it’s moved somewhere less damaging.
Anotyher key difference is the absence of competition in the public sector. One state industry, I knew got its internal teams to tender in competition with external contractors. It worked well but many unions will not accept such a practice so it is rarely an option.
January 10, 2025
Your last Para. is a good example of pro-active, creative management in the PUBLIC sector. I wonder how many other public services work this way, and how many more could. Was there ‘motivation’ ie bonuses for success?
Where there’s a will…..etc. Trouble is, one gets the impression that there is very little ‘will’ in the public sector.
January 10, 2025
I suspect that consultant overuse in the public sector is one of the reasons why productivity is low. But hey, the big four are claiming nice fees.
January 10, 2025
Large manufacturing companies or I should say successful ones run their businesses within the constraints of ISO 9000 or in some cases QS 9000 whose collective aims are quality and productivity. I have been away from the game too long to know whether there are particular forms of these disciplines that deal with purely administrative organisations such as the DVLA, HMRC, or DEFRA for instance. If there are, then they should be applied for the overall good of the end product, just as it is with Nissan for instance. The moral and esprit de corps within an organisation that works well is always better than one that limps along. Costs and quality are carefully controlled, resulting in happy customers and the continuation of a profitable organisation. Profit in the case of a public service equals customer satisfaction to a large extent. Cost to the customer is part of that. The application of japanese Kenzei, or continuous improvement, also adds to job satisfaction.
My one and only contact with the DVLA suggests that they have put earlier problems behind them. Reporting across many other government organisations suggests that they have yet to face the challenge, not helped of course when government itself does so much to alienate the public for purely party political ends. If you cannot retain customer, ie electoral support, you are on a downhill slippery slope to an early demise.
January 10, 2025
When dealing with a government department, if all goes well they are very good. It is when something goes wrong that they don’t know how to react or who to refer you to. Then it generally goes completely t*ts up
January 10, 2025
Yes AG, as I’ve mentioned here before, I put my business through ISO9000 because it made tendering for Government buisness much easier. I intially viewed it as just another hurdle we had to jump through but it was actually very useful when things went wrong (as they will). Staff knew the process and that they would be expected to account for their part in any audit. Sometimes they suggested process improvements in advance of any issues. However, it was often evident that some of the organisations that demanded ISO had nothing like it themselves, especially when it came to receivables
I watched an interview with Liz Truss last night and found her thoughts on ‘the Establishment’ quite compelling. She argues that anyone wishing to sort this problem out had better come very well prepared to take them on, because it is very hard to ‘fix’ the engine once the train has left the station. Her arguments seems to align quite closely with David Starkey’s views. In essence, we need a ‘Great Repeal’ to return the real levers of power back to Parliament and away from the 440-odd Quangos, BoE and Courts where they have steadily been moved to since Blair.
January 10, 2025
Excellent advice. It is unfortunate that, so often, it is not followed in the private as well as the public sector. I do wonder if the ease and volume of digital forms of communication has something to do with failures to get responses. Being old fashioned I wrote actual letters to a number of companies in November last year. The speed of response has ranged from immediate to still waiting for a reply.
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January 10, 2025
“Design a service they want, not one that is convenient for the provider.”
Good luck with that in the NHS!
January 10, 2025
So many produce nothing of value and it is of negative value. Merely inconveniencing, over taxing and wasting the time of the productive. Stop this activity and release these people to get real jobs. Start by ditching the whole of net zero and firing Ed Miliband. Encourage more people to use private schools and private healthcare with tax breaks for them to save money not the complete reverse so as to lighten the load on the state sector. Stop doing things the government should not even be doing. Have incentives to work, incentives to to be criminals, incentive not to leave the country, incentives to invest here, incentive to work hard and do well…
Alas Labour have a mad agenda that is the total reverse of this. Then again so did (and still have in the main) the net zero tax to death ConSocialists from Cameron through to Sunak.
January 10, 2025
Reduce low skilled immigration, which lowers wages, increases crime, increases demand for police, roads, jails, schools, houses… and cuts living standards.
You cannot tax your way to prosperity Ms Reeves, the countries tax system is already above the level where higher tax rates will give lower receipts. This even more so when so much of what the state spends is pointless or even damaging!
January 10, 2025
Yesterday I read that staff at one council the majority had second jobs because of WFH and a 4 day week. If the required work can be done in 4 days then there is an overstaffing problem.
The ONS and Land registry staff are working to rule because they’ve been asked to spend 3 days in the office. One minister described this as Victorians in attitude. My knowledge of the Victorians is one of hard work and dedication.
Milibrains department has a staff of 4500, what can they possibly be doing. The only way to increase productivity in the public sector is mass sackings.
January 10, 2025
Have workers in the right place.
Home working has a place in productivity for tasks that require solitude and concentration or for repetitive tasks that can be done anywhere.
Tasks and roles which learn by osmosis and ad hoc collaboration and where instant contact is needed with managers to rectify issues need to be office based and attended. Customer service roles should not be home based (and if they can be then outsource them to a locale with lower costs and put them in a room together).
January 10, 2025
Talk about Facts4eu pointing out the blindingly obvious. Of course productivity is “down on six years ago”, and not just within the (unspecified) public sector. How do the figures compare to three years ago though, during and just after the pandemic, rather than the year before its onset; how do they compare with 10 years ago, before the turmoil of Brexit (necessarily) imposed extra costs on both the public and private sector; how do they compare with 15 years ago, before the country had “Austerity” imposed upon it?
Reply Read the piece and see their graph instead of just being angry
January 10, 2025
Labour will do nothing to improve public sector productivity because the public sector represents one of the few remaining groups of reliable Labour voters. Any attempt to do so will induce strikes which Labour won’t stand up to for fear of upsetting the unions.
January 10, 2025
Your remarks are very persuasive and following your recommendations would doubtless help materially.
It occurs to me that telling staff they are less productive presents difficulties, not only because productivity is hard to measure, but too many (who may end the working week noticeably in need of rest and recuperation) will typically not respond well as they presume it is a judgement on their efforts rather than the systems and procedures they must work to that frustrate productive working.
Let us also recognize that for the most part the last rotten government cared not at all about productivity (even while paying lip service to its merits) and this rotten government does not either.
January 10, 2025
The article fails to identify WHY public sector productivity has fallen 8.5% in the last 6 years. Surely the quick fix is – identify that and reverse it!
I believe the simple and obvious answer is that working from home has caused the fall in productivity. The people in charge need to implement methods for measuring each employee’s productivity and sack people who are not pulling their weight.
That said, in reality it is hopeless. The public sector simply gets away with it. No matter how much people (customers!) complain, they just shrug and collect their salaries and generous pensions.
I know someone socially who works for a government department. We regularly meet during the day for social events. I occasionally say when we meet ‘not working today?’ – invariably the reply, accompanies by a grin, is ‘working from home’.
January 10, 2025
An outstanding post from Sir John. Quality management is essential in all varieties of public service and this means well thought out procedures that will deliver the outcomes desired.
Unfortunately, my experience of working as a private sector quality consultant on contract to the civil service (the MoD) let me to conclude that their systems were more geared to covering up the numerous cock-ups, rather than identifying the root cause of problems and rectifying them with effective corrective and preventive action.
There was far too much duplication, nobody stayed in their department for more than a couple of years and being asked to write a justification for a bad decision that led to taxpayer loss was considered a “gong” that was to be emulated.
The civil service is bloated and needs root and branch reform. Grade creep must be eliminated. They need to start sacrificing salary into their pension scheme. There is too much elitism in recruitment. We need technocrats to cope with the increasingly technical nature of our society. Why does the MoD need 67,000 civil servants when the field army is only 35,000 strong?
January 10, 2025
The assumption here is that everyone wants more productivity from not just the public sector, but generally.
With the Chancellor doing all she can to close down the economy it is unlikely that any focus will be turned on making civil servants more dynamic. They live in their own bubble and easily resist any efforts from ministers to improve the way they work or increase output.
In only 6 months labour have done more damage to the economy than even the Tories before them. I suspect, though it is a worthy subject, that public sector productivity will soon become irrelevant.
January 10, 2025
“As chairman I always asked to see complaints”
Right there is the difference between Public and Private sector management.
The Public sector managers do all in their power to make complaining impossible by blocking the public out any means of directly communicating with the service provider.
January 10, 2025
DEMOCRACY SHELVED
Despite his mounting problems, Starmer finds time to carry on with his plot to create unitary authorities to replace local and county councils. Where was the consultation on this?
Tory and labour councils have already voted to suspend local elections in May while HMG works out how they will be replaced at some future time.
The thing to note is that Starmer is defining a system, to bring us more in line with the EU, complete with mayors. God knows how many extra layers of bureaucracy this will create…. but it will all end up as a very expensive undemocratic white elephant.
January 10, 2025
Sadly the Public Sector still have dinosaur habits and unbreakable status quo thinking, safely shielded by Labour and their many unions.
Rachel Reeves talking tough cutting out waste but no action is a smoke screen. The Markets don’t believe her false promises, unlike Elon Musk (who even Putin recognised was very smart and delivers the goods, promises).
Because the Civil Service are so entrenched legally and are the hard rock core grit of the Public Sector other lesser unions and mortals follow suit.
January 10, 2025
I hardly ever get anything first time, for instance: we signed up for FTTP 3 years ago. It was pulled in in December, I was left to change all the internal connections over.
Nothing worked. I spent hours testing one connection at a time, including the new phones, because the old copper wire exchanges are to be made redundant.
Transpired that the old provider had failed to port the service to the new provider, a two week delay with no connections while they tried to flick the switch. During that time two relations died. We were uncontactable.
Then the system worked – for a while, went down last week for 3 days, dead. Now it is back up but every few minutes dies and the hub has to log back on. The phones can’t cope so they are unable even to take messages.
I have emailed and phoned the company repeatedly. They say they will respond. Not one contact initiated by them thusfar.
And the Government think that technology is going to bale them out 😳
January 10, 2025
All very sensible proposals from someone who has been at the sharp end and understands how things should be done. Unfortunately the last government stupidly allowed the efficiency of the public sector to fall by such a massive amount and Labour will certainly not address it in a vigorous manner. The train drivers and Junior Doctors pay settlements were proof enough : Theeves just gave them the money with no demand for productivity improvements. In the case of the train drivers, this was an unforgivable error, given that the rail industry, and in particular the driver’s unions, are riddled with very costly Spanish practices.
I do not think that the government, commentators, or the public yet appreciate what a dire situation Labour face mostly thanks to the expensive mistakes they have made in their first six months in office.
Starmer is going to have to reign in public spending in order to rescue the economy.
I would immediately reduce civil service and local government manpower numbers back to pre-pandemic levels. This can be done by natural wastage. By eliminating the unfunded final salary scheme, many highly paid civil servants will then apply for early retirement.
I would also cut back on Miliband’s ludicrously over-expensive net zero plans : Abandon the £28bn carbon capture plan for a start, which is entirely unproven technology and should be let to the private sector to develop. That saving alone would allow the rise in NI to be cancelled. Then grant all the new gas and oil exploration licences the industry will take. Although to be successful, a reduction in the windfall tax level will be needed but this will actually increase tax revenue and stop otherwise-profitable fields from being shut down prematurely. as is already happening. These will greatly improve our balance of payments and help shore up the currency.
We will also be able to abandon the stupid competitive tendering process for SMRs. Was any British politician seriously going to see this technology given to foreign competition ? The government should then immediately give the green light to Rolls-Royce to build two prototypes and at least the first ten UK installations.
We are unlikely to see any of these proposals come from a Labour government, nor, unsurprisingly, from a Conservative opposition dominated by Lib-Dim MPs masquerading as Conservatives. We are going to have to wait for the inevitable full-blown Sterling crisis to develop which will force a change of direction, and hopefully a change of government. Given the way things are developing, it seems likely that Reform and the Conservatives may well have a modest majority if there is an election in 2026-2027. That will give Labour ample time to become totally discredited.
January 10, 2025
What you say today goes a long way to demonstrating why private sector management has always been so much more efficient and successful than the public sector, and also why changing the approach of the public sector would require such a radical cultural change that no-one has ever made a serious attempt to achieve it, and I cannot see the current Government doing anything different to its predecessors in this respect.