Some of you may have noticed there’s a general election ongoing in the UK
Politicians of all colours and persuasions have produced their goody-bag manifestos to entice us, the public at large, to vote them into power and so be able to shower us with their gifts and skills
But those rafts of goodies need money to fund them – money which must come not only from taxes and borrowings but also from public sector productivity improvements
The problem with the latter, however, starts at first base – there are few good measures of productivity in the public sector so where best to act, when, with how much effort:
- At unit level, most have little on the availability, utilisation and efficiency of use of the costly resources they employ, especially their mix of labour and facilities
- At the macro level, where measurement is admitted to be ‘difficult’, those measures that do exist often involve dubious assumptions about input costs equalling output value so the more money spent, the more value obtained – and/ or dubious estimates relating volumes of output activity to quality of outcomes – yet, despite this uncertainty, decimal point changes per period in productivity of the health service, say, are claimed based on these same statistics
And this productivity improvement problem is then compounded by ‘experts’ concluding from such data plus their personal experiences that:
- Billions more needs to be spent on boosting staff inputs i.e. thousands more doctors and nurses, and training unemployed UK residents rather than recruiting from abroad
- Billions more also needs to be spent on more capital inputs – more new expensive equipment, IT and buildings
Yet those same ‘experts’ make little mention of the possibility that current use of existing resources and processes that have to be followed involve enormous waste of time and money – and the result of that can be enormous cost and possible pain or worse for end-customers, the general public whom they exist to serve
Why so?
Because nobody has much idea how much waste is involved – those in charge seem to assume that current ways of working are ‘about right’ and so the obvious need to meet an ever-increasing demand (for an ever-increasing range of services) is simply more expensive inputs
Just imagine if this were not the case – but nobody knows!
With this in mind, it’s well worth reading the following extracts from an article by Thomas Popecassia Rowland and the IFG – the well-respected Institute For Government whose mantra is’Working to make government more effective’ – in particular, Thomas seeks to answer: “What is public service productivity and how is it measured?”