The ONS has been busy changing its productivity figures. It thinks maybe it has been getting them wrong. It has come up with a bit faster growth rate in productivity 2009-19 looking at output per hour worked. The figures are still poor compared to the US which has outgrown the UK and the EU massively this century.
What is not changing is the picture of collapse in public sector productivity that occurred over covid. Where the private sector got back up to 2019 levels and pressed on after covid recovery, the public sector has still not got back to where it was seven years ago. Health and social services sits well down on 2019 whilst accounting for 8% of UK activity. Defence and public administration with 5% of UK activity, and Education at 6% of output are also down on their 2019 levels.
This means that one fifth of our economy in the hands of the public sector to supply goods and services has subtracted from productivity over a seven year period. This has been a time of big increases in public sector budgets with the public sector taking a rising share of activity. The public sector should be benefitting from the large spending on computer systems, as many of its activities are clerical and can be automated, or are services with substantial back offices. It has awarded itself pay rises well ahead of the private sector, enabling it to recruit and retain good people. Public sector pay in the most recent figures was up by 6.3% compared to just 2.9% for private sector pay.
I am all for people being better paid, but recognise to do so they need to work smarter and deliver more. Modern technology can allow this with suitable support and back up. The shame is large pay awards were made without any productivity deals. The scandal of the railways was the big award to well paid train drivers without agreeing a solution to manning in an age of more automated trains.
Paying people more without improving efficiency and quality of work, and tipping ever more cash into services that do not raise their productivity overburdens us with public spending. It creates a need to raise taxes to pay the bills. This government has created a doom loop. A badly run public sector makes too many cash demands. The resulting higher taxes drive talent and money out of the country and burden remaining businesses so they employ fewer and invest less. Public sector productivity should be at least 10% higher today than it is, still allowing for slow growth in it compared to the private sector. That would save us at least £50 bn a year to help control runaway borrowing or buy us £50 bn more services.
September 26, 2026
Afraid no one in Government appears to be bothered about the low Productivity and failure in our Public Services, as it never seems to get mentioned or even debated, on the contrary this present government seems to think more Pubic Sector growth and control, at more cost, is the answer to all of our problems.
September 26, 2026
BA,
Not strictly true. Yesterday on radio 4 ‘Today’ programme a minister used increasing productivity as a way to counter charges about defence spend not increasing sufficiently.
September 26, 2026
Perhaps when measuring state sector productivity we need to count only what they produce that is actually of positive value to people? So much is of negative value or zero value like Net Zero, the Covid Vaccines, the Covid Lockdowns, excessive red pay, the wars on employers, landlords, non doms, payments to encourage ever more feckless not to bother working, huge incentives and zero deterrents for ever more illegal and low skilled immigrants, shoplifters, phone muggers, HS2, the rigged market in trains relative to cars, in health care with the virtual monopoly NHS, schools and universities with soft “loans” for mainly duff & virtually worthless degrees, the serial currency debasement, cladding council tower blocks, unfair state competition in housing, the appalling post office scandal, a justice system that find Lucy Letby guilty 15 times they refuses her any appeal twice… of gives someone a two year jail sentence for throwing a plastic bottle!
So much of what the government does is far worst than digging holes and filling them in again it is grabbing money off people who would have used it far more wisely then doing pointless things and ever positively damaging things. Digging holes and filling them in again and smashing the public over the head with the spade between each spadeful they dig.
Money also spent hiding the appallingly high Covid Vaccine harm figures and the crime figures by ethnicity as the facts are hugely inconvenient to government. Plus all the money spent on state propoganda.
September 26, 2026
Problem is modern man is relatively weak and self-indulgent – compared to 500 years ago.
Take a stone mason 500 years ago. He’d do gruelling but creative and rewarding work, laying foundations and more of a cathedral. Only half built in his life time. Then he’d go home to wife and 10 kids and more gruelling work.
But he lived in a happy family home. He’s go to church on Sunday for divine refreshment, comfort, inspiration and having his batteries recharged.
Man back then was like a HONEY BEE, working in harmony for a common goal – of worth (not as perfectly as this).
But modern man is more like a BATTERY HEN. Running around stressed, unsure – going relatively mad (not completely but compared to 500 years ago). Or a rat in a concrete jungle.
That’s what you’re up against Lifelogic. It’s something much, much bigger than logic, politics or economics.
September 26, 2026
Edvard Munch’s The Scream sums up perfectly what I’m trying to say about modern man like a battery hen going relatively mad (compared to 500 years ago – the the stone mason, working like a honey bee in a relatively-rewarding but hard job building a cathedral and then going home to wife and 10 kids and warm family hearth, and then to church on Sunday for divine refreshment etc).
If you want to fix modern politics and economics then you first have to fix why man, so often, is running around like Munch’s The Scream ..
September 26, 2026
Doing negative things more efficiently is worse than doing them with poor productivity. So please can we just stop the state sector doing all these negative things. This alone would be a huge improvement in positive productivity. Release all these negative productivity people to get real and productive jobs in the private sector which they have to supply and keep happy willingly paying customers.
September 26, 2026
I’m with you Lifelogic.
But no-one is listening. No-one cares. They’re too far psychologically and emotionally embedded in whatever politics or anarchy or chaos they adhere to.
We’ve got to return to our trad Christian values (I am not pushing the actual faith as that is proselytising but the values of Christianity, at least, for our nation overall). So often, now, it’s each man for himself. Whether he’s of the left. Right. Centre. Woke. Raving loony party. All the same.
September 26, 2026
The worst productivity in the public sector is the civil service. Pre the pandemic, there were ~416,000 FTE civil servants. Today there are 523,795 or about 26% Source: GOV.UK
Staff numbers expanded sharply to handle both Brexit preparations and the legislative and operational delivery demands of the Covid-19 pandemic
The growth has failed to unwind because successive administrations redirected funding to operational delivery and enforcement, such as recruiting thousands of new compliance and debt management staff at HM Revenue
These people suffer from grade creep and massive office empire building, costing the taxpayer £billions in salaries and pension contributions. They export nothing, get more holidays with pay than the private sector and most of them are in a militant union.
The UK civil service is ripe for replacement by AI robots, who will work 24/7 365 days a year for no salary or pension and when they wear out, we can upgrade them with new ones. Probably Chinese.
September 26, 2026
The worst productivity in the public sector is the civil service. Pre the pandemic, there were 416,000 FTE civil servants. Today there are 523,795 or about 26%
Staff numbers expanded sharply to handle both Brexit preparations and the legislative and operational delivery demands of the Covid-19 pandemic
The growth has failed to unwind because successive administrations redirected funding to operational delivery and enforcement, such as recruiting thousands of new compliance and debt management staff at HM Revenue
These people suffer from grade creep and massive office empire building, costing the taxpayer £billions in salaries and pension contributions. They export nothing, get more holidays with pay than the private sector and most of them are in a militant union.
September 26, 2026
Another hugely negative state sector expense is the rigged market funding (with the BBC licence tax) of the BBC which is blatant left wing, pro EU, pro open borders, pro big governmetn and pro climate alarmist propoganda.
Alex Forsyth on Any Questions yesterday with the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Labour MP Sir Chris Bryant; Sarah Elliott, spokesperson for Republicans Overseas UK and director of the UK-US Special Relationship Unit at the Prosperity Institute; John Glen MP, who is Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s parliamentary private secretary; and the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, Paul Nowak.
John Glen Kemi’s PPS was not particularly impressive.
Is Reform refusing to appear on these programmes now or is the BBC cersoring them? As they surely do with Desert Island Discs?
Sarah Elliott the only one who seemed slightly right of centre and sensibly pointed out the the BBC should have to compete fairly with other media. So she will surely never get on the BBC again, Why do does Alex Forsyth (politics portmouth) constantly chip in with her personally & invatiably misguided and biased bbc views migrants, housing, climate, the EU, energy and similar?
September 26, 2026
The primary objective of the Public Sector is as with all bureaucracies is to expand itself. A 10% drop in productivity means increasing the head count by 10%.
As there is no incentive to produce anything worthwhile, in many cases only to obstruct activity nothing will ever change.
Quangos are the main obstruction to growth and efficiency as they are not accountable to parliament with MPs having no control.
September 26, 2026
I agree we should have a more efficient public sector but it’s arguably misleading to term it “productivity^ (I know that’s the correct term, but ir rankles). Few of them produce anything. The measure is notoriously difficult to calculate.
The main takeaway is that governments are very much to blame. If new legislation or regulation expands required tasks, public sector “input” increases (more time spent form-filling and interfering in peoples’ lives) but “output” seldom rises commensurately.
We need less government. We’ve seen it expand hugely in the past 30 years or so. It’s strangling us. Ultimately the fault for public sector bloating leads back to Westminster.
Reply They do produce services. A state school or hospital adds to GDP useful output like a private school or hospital. I am concentrating here on the 20% of GDP taken for public services, not the 25% of transfer payments and bureaucracy.
September 26, 2026
There was an article by Eltis and Bacon in the Sunday Times in 1973 in which they expressed the view that the Public Sector recruited (often in times of recession) but never discharged (in times of growth).
It was ever thus. Thousands were recruited by the public sector during Covid and they are still being employed. In the end productivity improvement is about better hourly output, if there is no increase in potential output then it is about reducing hours – getting some headcount reductions. Getting tough.
There are 5000 people in the Cabinet Office, what are they all doing? Would anybody notice if there were ONLY 4750? A 5% reduction.
September 26, 2026
The number of full-time equivalent civil servants is currently 523,795, an increase of 26.5% from 413,910 in 2019, as none of us has noticed an increase in productivity, quite the reverse, then more means less.
September 26, 2026
I too am all for people being better paid, but recognise to do so they need to work smarter and deliver more. Modern technology can indeed allow this with suitable support and back up.
But the main problem in the state sector is misdirection, corruption, vested interests, mad CO2 devil gas religions, the pushing of net zero and unsafe and ineffective COVID “Vaccines”, even to people with no need of them even had they been safe and effective. I see that the halfwitted Welsh government has been funding solar kayaks for the Peruvian Amazon. I supposes some politicians etc. will get tax payer funded trips to see these rather inefficient boats. Hopefully they will have a diesel engine backup and the batteries will not ignite. Do they have skilled maintenance people and gear for electric boats and all the electronics in deepest Peru?
September 26, 2026
So Burnham rules out an early election, not that I thought one was remotely likely he is not quite that daft. Another cowardly bottler like Gordon Brown. He says he will concentrate on the cost of living problems, but the main causes of the increasing cost of living problems are net zero, vast over taxation, vast over regulation, open borders, doom loop economics, Chagos and huge government waste and corruption… but these are all policies Burnham, Starmer and Labour pushed endlessly are they not?
September 26, 2026
Unfortunately telling public ‘servants’ to be more productive is identical to telling turkeys to vote for Christmas: as we have seen from many of your posts, generally a great deal of money is committed, grabbing bold type headlines, without a properly considered and costed justification. And it is massively in senior Civil Servants own interests to recruit more people, so they appear more important, with more minions reporting to them. To make anything remotely effective happen, it will need ministers of great determination and character, with a very well thought out agenda before they come to office. Which opposition party is taking the necessary steps?
Reply I am working with Conservatives on this and have published The Productivity toolkit, available as a free download from Centre for Policy Studies
September 26, 2026
The instant thing that comes to mind is the rapid growth in the Discrimination Departments(DEI). There to promote discord not the job
September 26, 2026
Public Sector activities often reduce productivity in the private sector. In my case my 4 bedroom house was reduced to 2 bedroom use as HMO legislation would have ruined its unspoiled period features. The the new Rental act has prevented me letting it at all and paying double council tax This has halved my income and I don’t use restaurants or hotels any more.
The council has taken 7k for licensing and taken on staff who apparently cannot read the forms and keep asking for certificates that I have already sent. Most of them have foreign names. Perhaps they have problems with reading English.
The HMRC have decided that I chose to go paperless which I never do, and require me to go on their computer system and use passwords which I don’t have. They are signing even low earners up to making tax digital, which will require 5 tax returns pa on expensive software. I have reduced my turnover on my remaining property and will live off saving for my remaining years. Less tax and less growth. Fine.
September 26, 2026
Simple, too many people doing not very much.
September 26, 2026
I find it difficult to picture how productivity in teaching and nursing is measured. Public facing services can be measured by clients seen and outcomes achieved but civil servants pushing paper and having online meetings must be quite difficult.
I would rather ministers concentrated on reducing government rather than worry about productivity. We don’t need much of what they are doing. We certainly need fewer laws and policy initiatives,just enforce what is already in place
September 26, 2026
Has it not occurred to you that the poor productivity is BECAUSE OF the software?
There seems to be this assumption that more apps and more software will improve things. The truth is, it often does not. Workers have to find workarounds or ways to avoid the system. No software has the flexibility required, even at the times it is working (which is another factor).
What effect is the NATS system having on our air travel industry ? It looks to me that it is destroying it, passengers are going to avoid the UK because of it.
September 26, 2026
Can one assume that 29% employer pension contributions are included somewhere in these productivity figures.
Time for 5% employer (taxpayer) defined contribution pension schemes to ve brought in.
That would increase productivity by 20% and give the public sector concerns about inflation
September 26, 2026
Consider this, were Mr A Burnham sincere in wishing to sort out the financial mess in which we exist, it is within his power.
For sure most of those within his parliamentary party are earning way above their pay grade, ergo they are are vulnerable. If they refuse, as they did on welfare, to back sensible decisions then he can threaten them with a general election which would see them return to their true role as pox docters clerks.
That he will not is proof of his insincerity and the ability to wield real power for the good of the nation. Sadly he will remain a pathetic socialist ruled by other pathetic socialists.
September 26, 2026
A casual, ill-informed reader might assume the figures have something of Rachel about them, and the arithmetic will be corrected in due course. In reality who needs figures for assessing what is wrong with UK productivity. G For a starter for 10, go ask the late teenagers and millions of unemployed for their views. Answer? Where do I get a job? Then take an impartial survey of what jobs and the numbers of public sector ‘workers’ are meaningfully employed.
Finally consult the successful entrepreneurs and willing investors for their views.