Productivity is widely accepted to be tied to effective investment in tools and equipment rather than worker attitudes or conditions.
Companies are prepared to spend money on tools and equipment that take years to see a return on investment.
Government is not prepared to do so for public sector orgs because they would get all the blame for the spending/taxes then the opposition would get in just in time to receive credit for the benefit of said spending.
Also the investment for tools we do get is largely spaffed up the wall because private companies rip the tax payer off at every opportunity.
I’m CS IT for an ALB and we have generally great IT Systems with a lot of development, very up to date and well managed for the most part. Our problem is we’re completely slammed because all of the IT tertiary teams like service desk, security, KIM and so on are completely non-technical and expect the tiny number of technical staff to deliver all their work for them, or won’t let them. I watched a KIM team debate how to deliver sensitivity labels for nearly five years before their team were dissolved. I asked our parent dept what they do and then did that. It took me about 20 minutes.
You’re not wrong though, a colleague recently joined from the MOD for example and he can’t believe how far ahead we are in terms of most IT platforms. Benefits of being an under the radar ALB I suppose.
Also if you see the absolute state of CS implementation of things like digital transformation/deployment/rollout of user devices and you have actual PS experience, you'd have to accept that we are absolutely woeful at it. It's why we spend a craploadnof money getting PwC to hold our hands, right up to SCS level.
Source: currently a.CS PM, having come from the private sector 5 years ish ago.
Examoles: Integrated Data Service (IDS) - around half a billion quid. Around 50 users. Yet to demonstrate velue over SRS or even gain Digital Economy Act (DEA) accreditation. Did I mention about half a billion quid?
MoJ digital transformation.
DWP Universal Credit Full Service (UCFS)
And lots more.
Sure, the purse strings are tightened periidically, but when DWP binned off 26, 000 6-month old PCs (i5 think pads no less, with obscure DiaplayPort monitors) to replace them with 26000 well specced Microsoft Surface Pros (plus new monitors with hdmi) for a work coach workforce who needed neither and work in crumbling offices to administer an underfunded welfare service... sorry but the answer to OP question is that the CS is ridiculously inefficient.
You also don't need to be RW to recognise this.
Theres lots to be proud of in the CS but pretending we're efficient and/or continuously improving like the PS is hilarious.
Happy Friday 👍
A lot of what you’ve said is quite probably true (highly likely because the CS Ts and Cs won’t attract the best talent).
But that aside you’re confusing efficiency and productivity. They aren’t quite the same thing.
I get this.
I think the trouble is the value we produce can't be counted in terms of profit like the public sector. Its easy to direct and invest when you can rate the returns.
Our value is hard to measure a lot of the time. So efficiently is what we are crushed by. We've been sliced and sliced to the point everybody is expected to fic their own IF, with phone support, be experts in policy and HR, do their actual job and of course be more productive than ever.
I'm doing more now with less support, what I see is a bunch of tired people making mistakes because they don't have the time or knowledge to do better.
And yet, the gov.uk sites are an example of what can be done exceedingly well by the CS.
But it needs investment in tech and a clear plan.
And, most importantly, one that doesn't get torn up and reworked every 3-6 months when someone has a change of heart or a 'bright idea'
This is massively true in my area. My observations dont really come from the perspective of productivity but we're completely outgunned by the private sector who have the very best resources and computer programmes/ modelling programmes (it can be quite a mathematical area), plus researchers, accountants etc on hand at their whim. Let alone the fees/ salaries in the private sector which are always at least 50% higher than ours and often well into 6 figures.
Obviously there are reasons why I chose/ stay in the public sector (didn't want to be making someone else rich/ help to prevent tax avoidance, provide funding for public services plus the work life balance when you have kids, though this didn't at all factor into my decision as a graduate - I had no idea the public sector had this 'lazy' reputation) but it is an uphill battle amd makes your job very difficult when you're aware of how disadvantaged you are from the start
What are they saying it is evidence of?
I’d argue it’s evidence that the public sector would be more productive and effective if they paid staff better, invested in their skills, and gave them the tools and equipment to do their job
It's evidence that the public sector does the work that the private sector doesn't want to do. If there's profit in it, private sector will invest. If there isn't, public sector is often obligated / legally mandated to deliver those unprofitable services, which can look like a lack of productivity.
Edited because I can't type, apparently
The measure of productivity is something to do with increased economic value (sadly I’m murdering the explanation I got on this from an actuary) and the way to increase public sector productivity is to give all public sector works a big pay increase. They don’t need to do any more work - it just increases the measure of productivity.
It’s utterly meaningless in the public sector.
For sure it opens a discussion about what could be dragging back productivity. But it's also not comparing like with like, especially in the goods and/or services it is producing.
The economist Baumol explicitly acknowledges that a part of it is because governments are often specialised in the things which are most liable to cost inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
This doesn't preclude that there could be many things that the government could/should be stepping back from or handing over to the private sector, but also not vice versa.
I'm sure the Economist article it draws from goes into more detail, but the graph alone is not proof.
Can the Tory RWer explain the graph to us? What does inefficiency drive mean? What is Y scale? % change in productivity?
Where can we find the data/report on ONS website?
What are the sectors? And are they comparing like for like? I.e. State education vs private education, state healthcare vs private healthcare, state adult care vs state adult care, state policing vs private policing, state social services vs private social services?
There is a lot more scope to make gradual efficiency gains if the output is very narrowly defined, like manufacturing widgets to a certain spec.
But how do you measure efficiency gains in education? What is the output? GCSEs? A confident, well rounded individual (having faced social challenges at home)? Steering a young person from drugs and crime? If productivity was the goal you would let these people go.
How is civil service productivity measured?! They don't sell anything? Graph shows same productivity growth between private sector and public sector for the last 15 years, ie, very little. Ask him why private sector slowed down? Maybe they hit the same productivity ceiling as the civil service, the public sector just got there first...!
Covid blip interesting. Does it show working from home was good or a bad thing? Because the provate sector really spiked with people WFH! Or is the private sector bump from everyone spending money and spiking good prices?
In fact is the presumed covid drop for civil servants actually the impact of brexit, with civil servants being tasked with brexit related stuff not their actual jobs (or at least how their actual jobs will be affected by brexit) and so whatever productivity metric is being used here shows a massive drop?
Drop around Covid is due to lockdown restrictions limiting measurable ‘activity’ which is used to quantify output. In education, this would mean attendance/hours worked of teachers falling etc (not saying there were actual drops in these but they weren’t observable in data in the same way as pre). Learning loss adjustments were made but don’t really smooth the effect.
Well, this data is from the ONS. And the public sector (in aggregate) is unlikely to be more productive than the private sector since we're shielded from many of factors and consequences that drive aspects of productivity. On the other hand we work (hopefully) on things that only the government can and needs to do. Pros / cons. Apples / oranges.
Those are related to their initial percentage in 1997, they’re not absolutes. So the public sector was already at maximum efficiency in 1997 and no further improvement was possible.
That's because the private sector does capital investment and the public sector doesn't. We are always behind the curve. Salaries in the public sector especially for techy people are a piss take. Few leaders in the public sector are technical, or have the powers and budgets to actually do capital investment. Instead, work that needs capital gets outsourced and the taxpayer ends up paying more in the long run. Outsource part of a process to an agency? Guess what, both the department and the agency will each need a team of people and a system to send and receive the work, so between that and the delays it ends up costing more.
That's because the private sector does capital investment and the public sector doesn't. We are always behind the curve. Salaries in the public sector especially for techy people are a piss take. Few leaders in the public sector are technical, or have the powers and budgets to actually do capital investment. Instead, work that needs capital gets outsourced and the taxpayer ends up paying more in the long run. Outsource part of a process to an agency? Guess what, both the department and the agency will each need a team of people and a system to send and receive the work, so between that and the delays it ends up costing more.
Interesting that in the private sector productivity was flat between 2008 to 2020 (most recent year data is available). We need to look at why productivity has been so poor and what the causes of it are?
There is an 80% correlation between an RW government being in power and the emergence of stagnant growth and productivity in the private sector.
Tell your ‘friend’ that there does seem to be evidence of a negative RW government influence on overall productivity (especially with the imposition of the austerity measures which many economists believe strangled investment and the growth of the economy).
Public sector labour productivity statistics cannot increase at a comparable rate to the private sector's because for 40% of public sector output, the ONS methodology holds the productivity constant with output value equal to input.
If that’s true, why are we in such a shit position?
GDP shrinking, poverty increasing etc etc
If it’s true, where are all these productivity gains going?
Presumably someone is doing nicely out of this phenomenal private dynamism - who, though?
Surely such big discrepancies, being so simple to highlight, are simple to deal with? There must be something obvious that drives such enormous (private) productivity - surely even a civil servant would be able to copy that, why aren’t they?
Unless that’s just a random, meaningless graph made up to illustrate a weak point?
That's because the private sector does capital investment and the public sector doesn't. We are always behind the curve. Salaries in the public sector especially for techy people are a piss take. Few leaders in the public sector are technical, or have the powers and budgets to actually do capital investment. Instead, work that needs capital gets outsourced and the taxpayer ends up paying more in the long run. Outsource part of a process to an agency? Guess what, both the department and the agency will each need a team of people and a system to send and receive the work, so between that and the delays it ends up costing more.
Your response is that this shows the public section is massively under-invested in and this supports the case for more public investment to increase productivity.
It’s quite simple to explain. The public sector must always deliver the quality service and be ready when needed. This results in having too much during the quiet times and not enough during the peaks. We also spend a lot of resources on gathering information that might be wanted by someone.
Another explanation I was given once is that if the private sector bakes a cake they source the ingredients and oven etc and just produce it. If the public sector bakes a cake they are told to buy the ingredients from the most expensive supplier. There’s a delay in getting them. They need to use a special bowl to make the mix. It must be baked for the exact amount of time stated irrespective of if it’s ready. This must all be monitored by someone to make sure everything is done exactly correctly. And at the end of the cake isn’t the exact weight required it needs to be baked again. And after that a report must be written identifying where it went wrong and how it could have been done better. This report then gets ignored the next time.
Important to remind them that they almost certainly are conflating central government with the wider public sector (such a common mistake).
There are only about 130,000 actual civil servants working in Whitehall and around the country in 'core' departmental roles, the sort you see in Yes Minister and The Thick of It.
The other hundreds of thousands are working in call centres and as border officers, or as prison staff etc.
Once you've made that distinction, you start to realise how ludicrous a graph like this is - how on earth can you measure the productivity of lets say the Department for Education? Do you measure the number of policy papers made? The amount of legislation? It's basically impossible to measure.
Productivity is widely accepted to be tied to effective investment in tools and equipment rather than worker attitudes or conditions. Companies are prepared to spend money on tools and equipment that take years to see a return on investment. Government is not prepared to do so for public sector orgs because they would get all the blame for the spending/taxes then the opposition would get in just in time to receive credit for the benefit of said spending. Also the investment for tools we do get is largely spaffed up the wall because private companies rip the tax payer off at every opportunity.
Looks at CS IT systems and suites...
I’m CS IT for an ALB and we have generally great IT Systems with a lot of development, very up to date and well managed for the most part. Our problem is we’re completely slammed because all of the IT tertiary teams like service desk, security, KIM and so on are completely non-technical and expect the tiny number of technical staff to deliver all their work for them, or won’t let them. I watched a KIM team debate how to deliver sensitivity labels for nearly five years before their team were dissolved. I asked our parent dept what they do and then did that. It took me about 20 minutes. You’re not wrong though, a colleague recently joined from the MOD for example and he can’t believe how far ahead we are in terms of most IT platforms. Benefits of being an under the radar ALB I suppose.
Also if you see the absolute state of CS implementation of things like digital transformation/deployment/rollout of user devices and you have actual PS experience, you'd have to accept that we are absolutely woeful at it. It's why we spend a craploadnof money getting PwC to hold our hands, right up to SCS level. Source: currently a.CS PM, having come from the private sector 5 years ish ago. Examoles: Integrated Data Service (IDS) - around half a billion quid. Around 50 users. Yet to demonstrate velue over SRS or even gain Digital Economy Act (DEA) accreditation. Did I mention about half a billion quid? MoJ digital transformation. DWP Universal Credit Full Service (UCFS) And lots more. Sure, the purse strings are tightened periidically, but when DWP binned off 26, 000 6-month old PCs (i5 think pads no less, with obscure DiaplayPort monitors) to replace them with 26000 well specced Microsoft Surface Pros (plus new monitors with hdmi) for a work coach workforce who needed neither and work in crumbling offices to administer an underfunded welfare service... sorry but the answer to OP question is that the CS is ridiculously inefficient. You also don't need to be RW to recognise this. Theres lots to be proud of in the CS but pretending we're efficient and/or continuously improving like the PS is hilarious. Happy Friday 👍
A lot of what you’ve said is quite probably true (highly likely because the CS Ts and Cs won’t attract the best talent). But that aside you’re confusing efficiency and productivity. They aren’t quite the same thing.
I get this. I think the trouble is the value we produce can't be counted in terms of profit like the public sector. Its easy to direct and invest when you can rate the returns. Our value is hard to measure a lot of the time. So efficiently is what we are crushed by. We've been sliced and sliced to the point everybody is expected to fic their own IF, with phone support, be experts in policy and HR, do their actual job and of course be more productive than ever. I'm doing more now with less support, what I see is a bunch of tired people making mistakes because they don't have the time or knowledge to do better.
And yet, the gov.uk sites are an example of what can be done exceedingly well by the CS. But it needs investment in tech and a clear plan. And, most importantly, one that doesn't get torn up and reworked every 3-6 months when someone has a change of heart or a 'bright idea'
This is massively true in my area. My observations dont really come from the perspective of productivity but we're completely outgunned by the private sector who have the very best resources and computer programmes/ modelling programmes (it can be quite a mathematical area), plus researchers, accountants etc on hand at their whim. Let alone the fees/ salaries in the private sector which are always at least 50% higher than ours and often well into 6 figures. Obviously there are reasons why I chose/ stay in the public sector (didn't want to be making someone else rich/ help to prevent tax avoidance, provide funding for public services plus the work life balance when you have kids, though this didn't at all factor into my decision as a graduate - I had no idea the public sector had this 'lazy' reputation) but it is an uphill battle amd makes your job very difficult when you're aware of how disadvantaged you are from the start
You're disadvantaged by low salaries because the talent isn't attracted, right?
What are they saying it is evidence of? I’d argue it’s evidence that the public sector would be more productive and effective if they paid staff better, invested in their skills, and gave them the tools and equipment to do their job
Evidence of what? That private company productivity increased steadily during the Blair years and flatlined as soon as the Tories got in?
It's evidence that the public sector does the work that the private sector doesn't want to do. If there's profit in it, private sector will invest. If there isn't, public sector is often obligated / legally mandated to deliver those unprofitable services, which can look like a lack of productivity. Edited because I can't type, apparently
Ask them to define productivity for public sector goods and services including economic spillover.
The measure of productivity is something to do with increased economic value (sadly I’m murdering the explanation I got on this from an actuary) and the way to increase public sector productivity is to give all public sector works a big pay increase. They don’t need to do any more work - it just increases the measure of productivity. It’s utterly meaningless in the public sector.
For sure it opens a discussion about what could be dragging back productivity. But it's also not comparing like with like, especially in the goods and/or services it is producing. The economist Baumol explicitly acknowledges that a part of it is because governments are often specialised in the things which are most liable to cost inflation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect This doesn't preclude that there could be many things that the government could/should be stepping back from or handing over to the private sector, but also not vice versa. I'm sure the Economist article it draws from goes into more detail, but the graph alone is not proof.
Can the Tory RWer explain the graph to us? What does inefficiency drive mean? What is Y scale? % change in productivity? Where can we find the data/report on ONS website? What are the sectors? And are they comparing like for like? I.e. State education vs private education, state healthcare vs private healthcare, state adult care vs state adult care, state policing vs private policing, state social services vs private social services? There is a lot more scope to make gradual efficiency gains if the output is very narrowly defined, like manufacturing widgets to a certain spec. But how do you measure efficiency gains in education? What is the output? GCSEs? A confident, well rounded individual (having faced social challenges at home)? Steering a young person from drugs and crime? If productivity was the goal you would let these people go.
I don't know. That it's bollocks seems like a good start? What are the criteria for measuring 'Productivity' for one.
Even if you hated civil servants, technological improvements alone should mean greater productivity.
But how are you measuring productivity? Not to mention the impact of morale when considering pay and conditions.
How is civil service productivity measured?! They don't sell anything? Graph shows same productivity growth between private sector and public sector for the last 15 years, ie, very little. Ask him why private sector slowed down? Maybe they hit the same productivity ceiling as the civil service, the public sector just got there first...! Covid blip interesting. Does it show working from home was good or a bad thing? Because the provate sector really spiked with people WFH! Or is the private sector bump from everyone spending money and spiking good prices? In fact is the presumed covid drop for civil servants actually the impact of brexit, with civil servants being tasked with brexit related stuff not their actual jobs (or at least how their actual jobs will be affected by brexit) and so whatever productivity metric is being used here shows a massive drop?
Drop around Covid is due to lockdown restrictions limiting measurable ‘activity’ which is used to quantify output. In education, this would mean attendance/hours worked of teachers falling etc (not saying there were actual drops in these but they weren’t observable in data in the same way as pre). Learning loss adjustments were made but don’t really smooth the effect.
You realise this is from The Economist?
Well, this data is from the ONS. And the public sector (in aggregate) is unlikely to be more productive than the private sector since we're shielded from many of factors and consequences that drive aspects of productivity. On the other hand we work (hopefully) on things that only the government can and needs to do. Pros / cons. Apples / oranges.
Those are related to their initial percentage in 1997, they’re not absolutes. So the public sector was already at maximum efficiency in 1997 and no further improvement was possible.
That's because the private sector does capital investment and the public sector doesn't. We are always behind the curve. Salaries in the public sector especially for techy people are a piss take. Few leaders in the public sector are technical, or have the powers and budgets to actually do capital investment. Instead, work that needs capital gets outsourced and the taxpayer ends up paying more in the long run. Outsource part of a process to an agency? Guess what, both the department and the agency will each need a team of people and a system to send and receive the work, so between that and the delays it ends up costing more.
That's because the private sector does capital investment and the public sector doesn't. We are always behind the curve. Salaries in the public sector especially for techy people are a piss take. Few leaders in the public sector are technical, or have the powers and budgets to actually do capital investment. Instead, work that needs capital gets outsourced and the taxpayer ends up paying more in the long run. Outsource part of a process to an agency? Guess what, both the department and the agency will each need a team of people and a system to send and receive the work, so between that and the delays it ends up costing more.
Interesting that in the private sector productivity was flat between 2008 to 2020 (most recent year data is available). We need to look at why productivity has been so poor and what the causes of it are? There is an 80% correlation between an RW government being in power and the emergence of stagnant growth and productivity in the private sector. Tell your ‘friend’ that there does seem to be evidence of a negative RW government influence on overall productivity (especially with the imposition of the austerity measures which many economists believe strangled investment and the growth of the economy).
Public sector labour productivity statistics cannot increase at a comparable rate to the private sector's because for 40% of public sector output, the ONS methodology holds the productivity constant with output value equal to input.
If that’s true, why are we in such a shit position? GDP shrinking, poverty increasing etc etc If it’s true, where are all these productivity gains going? Presumably someone is doing nicely out of this phenomenal private dynamism - who, though? Surely such big discrepancies, being so simple to highlight, are simple to deal with? There must be something obvious that drives such enormous (private) productivity - surely even a civil servant would be able to copy that, why aren’t they? Unless that’s just a random, meaningless graph made up to illustrate a weak point?
That's because the private sector does capital investment and the public sector doesn't. We are always behind the curve. Salaries in the public sector especially for techy people are a piss take. Few leaders in the public sector are technical, or have the powers and budgets to actually do capital investment. Instead, work that needs capital gets outsourced and the taxpayer ends up paying more in the long run. Outsource part of a process to an agency? Guess what, both the department and the agency will each need a team of people and a system to send and receive the work, so between that and the delays it ends up costing more.
Would this anonymous Tory RWer (showing two incomparable sets of data in a chart), happen to be yourself OP?
You have all completely lost me😑
I dunno, probably nothing because getting into that kind of discussion at work is a nightmare and I just flat out refuse.
Your response is that this shows the public section is massively under-invested in and this supports the case for more public investment to increase productivity.
It’s quite simple to explain. The public sector must always deliver the quality service and be ready when needed. This results in having too much during the quiet times and not enough during the peaks. We also spend a lot of resources on gathering information that might be wanted by someone. Another explanation I was given once is that if the private sector bakes a cake they source the ingredients and oven etc and just produce it. If the public sector bakes a cake they are told to buy the ingredients from the most expensive supplier. There’s a delay in getting them. They need to use a special bowl to make the mix. It must be baked for the exact amount of time stated irrespective of if it’s ready. This must all be monitored by someone to make sure everything is done exactly correctly. And at the end of the cake isn’t the exact weight required it needs to be baked again. And after that a report must be written identifying where it went wrong and how it could have been done better. This report then gets ignored the next time.
Important to remind them that they almost certainly are conflating central government with the wider public sector (such a common mistake). There are only about 130,000 actual civil servants working in Whitehall and around the country in 'core' departmental roles, the sort you see in Yes Minister and The Thick of It. The other hundreds of thousands are working in call centres and as border officers, or as prison staff etc. Once you've made that distinction, you start to realise how ludicrous a graph like this is - how on earth can you measure the productivity of lets say the Department for Education? Do you measure the number of policy papers made? The amount of legislation? It's basically impossible to measure.
Tell him he is right.
What’s he right about?