The low level of turnout at many of the elections and the low level of support for all the main parties with Labour topping the polls with just 35% on the national calculation displays a big gap between what the public want and will support and what the parties are offering. Councils spend huge...
Treasury has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (15529): Question: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what steps he is taking to increase public sector productivity. (15529) Tabled on: 26 February 2024 Answer: Laura Trott: The government has a relentless focus on getting the most out of every pound spent...
Everyone an owner. There’s a popular Conservative policy that reaches out across the divide. An owner can be a self employed person setting up and running their own business. They can be a shareholder in a company they work for. It can be a left of centre idea in the form of a co-operative...
^The large fall in public sector productivity since 2019, assessed at 7.5% by the ONS to last year, is a major cost to taxpayers and a major drag on economic performance. The immediate task for the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the Cabinet Office Minister for the civil service must be to arrest...
The Chancellor in his speech to conference last week stated that he is now onto the productivity problem in the public sector I have been highlighting: He said “We need a more productive state not a bigger state. If we increase public sector productivity growth by just half a percent, we can stabilise public...
The combination of inflation, a productivity collapse and higher interest rates means public spending is up by £350 bn this year compared to 2019. No wonder taxes are so high. If the public services got their productivity back up to 2019 levels they would cost £30 bn less. Productivity was down 15.2% in 2020,...
I have pointed out before that the UK uses a different statistical presentation of public sector health and education to comparable countries. The UK attempts to proxy output of these services, rather than just including their costs. This led to a faster decline in UK GDP when the lockdowns occurred, as both services cut...
The big decline in public sector productivity over the pandemic, and the failure to get back to previous levels now we are well past lockdowns is disturbing. The government needed to accept the Pay Review Body recommendations, as it did last year when they were tough on staff. It also needs to impart a...
The crude public sector good private sector bad which dominates much opposition party thinking is no reflection of the reality of life. Some years ago I wrote about how we could better characterise and assess public services. I proposed assessing each with three main questions: Are they competitive or monopolies? Are they owned and...
In an age of digital investment, artificial intelligence, smart phone activity and other leaps forward in productivity from technology, you would expect the UK public services to have had a good 25 years achieving more from its workforce thanks to investment and modernisation. Instead the Office of National Statistics reports that public sector productivity...