23 Comments
Apr 1, 2023Liked by Sam Freedman

One incredibly unhealthy dynamic in the current pay structure of core government departments is that pay is fixed in grade bands and there is very little flexibility to recognise expertise or experience if people are not promoted - which means that there is little incentive for people to settle into roles and really come to master a subject.

Then, due to wage pressure, it's much cheaper to get bright but very new people in to tackle complex problems. The fast stream is all very well, but fast streamers are incredibly poorly equipped for many of the issues that they get pointed at - and newly appointed ex-fast-streamers often end up reinventing the wheel, or flailing. One big aspect of this is that the spending teams at HMT who are responsible for negotiating settlements across government are largely very young and untested. It's great to give people a chance to get experience and to bring in new perspectives - but without institutional memory you get the same mistakes over and over and over again.

And, as you say, salaries for back office staff are not competitive with equivalents in the private sector, which benefits those who can afford it (I took a 20% pay cut in 2018 to move into a Grade 7 role in the civil service; I was coming off maternity leave with two young children but was lucky enough to have the financial security to take the hit in exchange for a job I believed in).

Further anecdotal reflection - I know multiple people who left the civil service following the back-to-the-office debacle, both because of the lack of flexibility and because the way it played out felt so aggressive and lost a lot of trust (particularly the implications that people wfh were not working, and the way ministers and senior leadership failed to defend civil servants who had just poured their all into coordinating the covid response, at huge cost to their mental and physical health and their families' wellbeing).

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For junior doctors you could help retention a lot via relatively small changes to make the contract less demanding. Easiest would be paying for courses when you pay for them rather than when you do the course months later. Could also look at rotating over shorter distances - with a few exceptions (West Cornwall Hospital is just a long way away from the nearest teaching hospital) there isn't really a reason to make people commute over such large distances, also longer rotations (or the same length but with consecutive rotations in the same hospital so they stay longer), a small amount of time per week of paid admin time.

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It's funny how all that you underline as the critical issues in healthcare management and operations from lack of investment, to short-termism, to blindness to causes rather than symptomes, to pressures on, and lack of, staff resemble very closely what is going on in France. The reasons are the same....longterm political mediocrity and dominance of accounting approaches to service provision....and the very clear intention of avoidng the subject until elections.

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Apr 1, 2023Liked by Sam Freedman

"The overall package needs to be more generous but if there was also a shift from pension to pay it would make jobs like teaching look much more attractive. It could even be offered as a choice, I’m fairly sure most people would take the pay."

Whilst I think this is a sensible approach in terms of improving the 'offer', the ex-public sector auditor in me would like to see a costing done. People over the years have asked why the government doesn't move people over from DB schemes to DC schemes given how out of line they are with the private sector and I suspect the answer is the accounting. Switching people to DC schemes today (or giving them higher take-home pay) means that the cash cost of that has to be borne today. Instead of paying just for retired public sector workers' DB pension payments, today's taxpayers would also need to find the cash to hand either directly to current workers or put in their DC schemes, meaning extra government borrowing, not meeting fiscal mandates etc etc.

(Of course, this is all just an accounting problem - moving DB to DC would likely save money over the long term, but the accounting means that it wouldn't look like that for many electoral cycles. Similar accounting problems are what have led to PFI, delaying HS2/LTC and I fear what would prevent Sam's sensible suggestion about pension flexibility above)

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Apr 1, 2023Liked by Sam Freedman

It looks rather like Canada, too, though the UK at least has one NHS. Here, each province runs its own health system and education system using federal funding. However, professional credentials/licensing are also by province, with no reciprocity or portability between jurisdictions.

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Apr 1, 2023Liked by Sam Freedman

excellent piece!

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I still do not understand why so many senior leaders in schools actively refuse to allow their teachers to complete PPA from home. Such a small concession that would make a considerable difference.

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Sam - thanks for this. Unfortunately the issues are structural: if you have a significant faction of the political class driven by the ideology of a 'small state' and another attempting to implement an inchoate socialism able to access power through the machinery of the two Parties then Public Sector management is crisis management. Soundly-based strategic management can emerge once FPTP is eradicated, and constitutional arrangements at local and regional level provide the resonance required to plan effectively over the medium to long term. The current situation is unsustainable.

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Great post. Reading it prompted me to think about the extent to which issues such as the poor state of public services, the UK's productivity problem, Brexit and other factors might combine to put the UK into a long term downward spiral, that is difficult to recover from.

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Your insight on Rees Mogg -- "I doubt he cared ... " points to the probability that for a significant element in his party the problems you describe are a feature, not a bug, of the UK they want to govern.

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There is a wider, i.e. literally world wide problem and that is that, with the exception of Africa, population replacement numbers have dropped blow the stable replacement figure of 2.1. Britain has also a problem with this, and it has existed for some time. The balance is also wrong, with working age people, particularly the young, gradually being outnumbered by the older and increasingly non working, older age groups.

For about 20 years, as middle level IT support, the rates offered froze, thereby pushing down the value of my income year on tear. Over the past year I have seen this rise by about 30%, now that I am increasingly too old to work much, cannot take advantage of this bounty.

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Penny wise, pound foolish. By taking the spreadsheet approach, successive Conservative governments have achieved cascade failure across the UK public sector. I doubt it was deliberate, but the danger is that they get in for a 5th term and point to public sector disintegration as a justification to outsource core state functions. While this used to be guaranteed political suicide, I don't think this remains the case. I don't believe they *deliberately* underfunded everything to the point of collapse so they privatise it, bit of the outcome is the same, the intentions are ultimately irrelevant.

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"free teas and coffees"

Absolutely absurd not to supply this

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I feel you underestimate the potential impact of AI technology, which has entered an exponential phase now. Making knowledge workers’ lives 10% easier seems very low for what *could* be done with GPT-4 level technology: the incredible speed with which this is being integrated by private companies (eg Google, Microsoft integrating it into their Office packages) indicates how much of an infinitely-bladed Swiss Army knife it is. It seems to me that simply paying for these upgrades to existing products (and in some cases, eg Google, I’m pretty sure they will be free anyway) could, if embraced and trained for, achieve at least a 10% boost in productivity. The stories I’m hearing from people who already use GPT-4 for work sometimes indicate an increase of more like 1000/10,000% for certain types of task. And that’s before you even consider the (admittedly politically/regulatorily unpalatable) possibilities for a more bespoke approach: a slightly tweaked GPT-4 could, I’m convinced, do a considerably better job, orders of magnitude more cheaply, at eg NHS 111 calls (where the people taking the calls often seem to be following a flowchart that constrains them to act like a much dumber computer programme) or even probably a lot of GP telephone appointments. Education seems like another obvious use case that the private sector is undoubtedly already working on. All of this is both exciting and terrifying, but it is already here and will keep coming in ever greater volume and sophistication. You could argue that our system of government isn’t ready to adopt it, but, in the context of this discussion, addressing this would seem to be a significant action point.

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Given the responsibility, senior civil servants are paid a fraction of analogues in local government and the health service, let alone the private sector. If your real pay has fallen significantly over the last 13 years, you can see why people are looking elsewhere - before we even begin discussing bullying, professional disrespect, and the absolutely woeful performance of Simon Case, who should have resigned over partygate.

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The UK does not have a strategy. As we see clearly today, far from being a strategy, Brexit was a distraction from solving real problems, and in the process it has created new problems of relative isolation and reduced relevance for the country. What is needed next is a courageous leader to emerge, willing to go out on a limb by proposing a new strategy. Unfortunately, there is as yet none in sight, but leaders often emerge when we least expect it.

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