We can solve the public sector worker shortage

Amongst the biggest problems facing the UK at the moment is a recruitment and retention crisis in the public sector. It’s hitting every part of the NHS, education, social services, local government, policing, justice, and civil service.

While inflation has acted as the tipping point, much of the industrial action we’re now seeing in the public sector stems from over a decade of under-investment in the public sector, leaving services so poorly staffed they barely manage under normal circumstances and find themselves overwhelmed in the face of growing demand.

I have no doubt that a reasonable pay deal from the Government would go some way to making public service a more attractive employment sector again, helping with recruitment and to a much greater extent retention. However, the reality is that even if we were to pour money into the public sector, most of the roles we require extensive training and as a result even if we weren’t facing a demographic timebomb with much of population retiring-out of the workforce, we would have to wait years to see significant capacity increases.

Of course, the nature of economics is that for every good or service there is both supply and demand. So, if in the short-term we cannot increase the overall supply of labour time available to the public sector, we need to ask ourselves how we’re going to deal with demand.

The simplest approach would be to do nothing, capacity is capped by the limits of the workforce and demand is resolved by large numbers not having their needs met. This appears to be the Conservatives’ approach and which is causing the deaths of roughly 300-500 people we week at the moment.

The more complicated approach is to look at the services the public sector provides as a system and consider what bits of necessary for delivering the goals of each service and which parts of the process are in truth unnecessary. Remove the wasteful parts and you’ve instantly increased the labour time available for productive work.

This isn’t a new idea, I first wrote about it over a decade ago, having read John Seddon’s Freedom from Command and Control whilst still at university. Of course, complaining about waste and bureaucracy is nothing new, but to actually deliver results requires a clear and rigorous process to identify all the demands upon the service, the steps which are required to actually deliver upon those demands, and then redesigning the department so that only those bits which are necessary are retained. Welcome to ‘systems thinking’.

This isn’t just a theory, it’s the process Toyota used to go from a company which had only survived through war and isolation to the world’s largest automobile manufacturer and in the UK it has been used on a local level by various parts of the public sector to improve service outcomes. This includes various departments in Crawley Borough Council, where it has enabled us to maintain service quality while facing unprecedented budget cuts from central government.

I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that there is no successful national example of its use in the public sector so far, we live in the most centralised state in the Western world were orders are sent from Whitehall and performance statistics fed back without much genuine understanding flowing in either direction. However, with Labour’s Brown Commission, having set out a pathway to a genuinely more decentralised UK, and the party’s discussion around tackling bureaucracy within the NHS seems to hint at this.

This road is not without its issues. Firstly, it requires something Government is incredibly uncomfortable with: letting go. You can’t micromanage people’s work and expect them to operate at their maximum efficiency, you need to trust them to do their jobs.

Similarly, we have to accept the epistemological that many of the things we’re trying to achieve cannot be effectively measured in the work of a department. A lot of what the public sector does is about achieving long-term outcomes which cannot be measured part-way through or are tasks which are subject to natural fluctuations in demand which can make it look as though a team is succeeding or failing due to circumstances outside of anyone’s control. Instead of accepting that some things are hard to measure, we instead opt for proxy measures which have some correlation with what we’re after and this does two very bad things. The first is that you start punishing or reward people on the basis of something unrelated to what the service is actually trying to achieve, in the process distorting the actual outcomes. The second is that you create a system which aims to maximise that proxy measure at all costs, this reminds me of how in the late Soviet Union shoe factories with impossible targets started only making shoes for one foot, optimising the process to hit the target but ending up with a product which no one could actually use. Both issues compromise the efficiency of the system while adding more pointless paperwork.

There are challenges involved in this. Any restructure involves taking people out of day-to-day work to redesign the system and then there’s a learning period. There’s also a risk of streamlining too much in one department and as a result increasing the demands upon another department, I speak from experience on this point, so you have to have some method of avoiding silo thinking. Lastly, systems thinking isn’t an event, it’s an ongoing process. Teams periodically need to continue reviewing the demands and what is necessary to fulfil them and, more importantly, operational and policy decision-makers need to consider what unnecessary bits of process the decisions they are taking have on those actually delivering the service. This is something I’ve occasionally got into arguments about with other councillors where it was clear that a proposal would end up costing productive time from a service for essentially no reason.

It’s also going to require a change to the way we balance risks and deal with litigation, including potentially reconsidering how our civil law system operates. For all the talk about ‘political correctness’ and ‘health and safety’ creating bureaucracy, in my experience the actual policies around these areas are pretty light-touch, what creates the paperwork is the fear of being sued. As a result, vast amounts of forms are generated to ‘evidence’ that everything has been done correctly to protect the public sector from litigation. I’m not going to claim that there aren’t times when public services have failed people in extremely serious ways or that the injured party should be denied some form of compensation to help deal with the consequences, but the industry which has built up around this is now causing far greater harms than it is trying to avoid. It requires a big rethink, both around how we manage risk (an ongoing bugbear of mine and one which at times probably strained my relationship with the council’s lawyers at CBC) and some protection for public services from litigation without mountains of paper.

With the mind-shift required within individual services, Whitehall and civil law, this is clearly no easy task, but the pay-off is potentially huge. Talk to any public service professional about how much of their workload is necessary to actually help people and how much is paperwork and the results may surprise you. I’ve known police officers who refused to arrest people because the level of paperwork involved would require the rest of their shift, preventing them being available to respond to urgent calls and putting the public at risk. Social workers tell me that almost all their time is now spent is on filling in forms, rather than engaging with the families and children in desperate need of direct contact. Just last month, in a conversation with a teacher around the demands of their work, they gave me an assessment that just 15% of their work outside of the classroom was on activities which would actually help their children with their education. Imagine if we could free up that amount of time for every teacher in the country, imagine the impact that could have.

The problems facing the public sector right now are huge. Systems thinking may have its challenges, but if we’re prepared to overcome them, then even in the face of huge demographic pressures, we can have the world’s best public services again.