Last week, CIPD published its most recent Labour Market Outlook, a quarterly account of over 2,000 employers’ views on a range of issues of the day, most significantly around employment recruitment, retention and reward.
While most of the themes carried across from the last quarter, the contrast between public and private sectors appears to have continued to grow with public sector employers being more than twice as likely to be looking to decrease staff numbers over the next quarter, lower pay awards, and over half of public sector employers struggling with hard-to-full vacancies.
Having run a public sector body for almost a decade as council leader, none of this is particularly new, but the ongoing nature of these differences with the gap between public and private growing each quarter does point towards the continued decline of the public sector.
The simple reality is that at Crawley Borough Council there are a number of areas where we pay far below the market average for a role. We have apprentices who leave the council and immediately make more money than double the amount of those who were training them while other business critical roles are left vacant for prolongued periods or where requirements are reduced significantly in order to attract sufficient numbers of applicants. There are at least a few resident-facing service areas where I know for a fact that a decline in performance stems directly from these recuritment and retention issues.
Crawley isn’t some outlier. In fact the decision to retain the Crawley Allowance and address wage inequalities early on mean that we pay better than most for the majority of roles (with the exception of the most senior staff, who are paid below the rate of neighbouring authorities). This is the norm amongst the public sector now.
In essence, public services rely upon people’s good will in order to function, a desire not to go for a job which would earn them more money because they would rather serve the common good. Whether or not you believe it’s acceptable to exploit people’s good nature I leave up to you, but there are limits.
Some of this is simply that as private sector pay out-performs public sector pay growth quarter-by-quarter year-after-year, many of which have much higher training/education requirements than private sector roles, people hit a point where they can no longer afford a career path built on public service.
For others its the way the job is getting worse as people increasingly seem to think it is acceptable to abuse those working in public-facing roles. I have heard this first-hand from paramedics, teachers, local government officers, and police officers.
Both of these are issues which a future Government is going to have to deal with if it wants to address the recruitment and retention challenges in the public sector, without which we will find our services locked into indefinite decline.
Peter Lamb for Crawley 