News

The government says new money for public services must be spent on service improvements, not staff pay. But, as Brendan Martin reports, the evidence suggests that attracting and keeping staff, and boosting staff morale are essential to giving users what they want and deserve.

Downing Street was said to be perplexed that, not 48 hours after chancellor Gordon Brown’s comprehensive spending review committed larger budget increases to public services than had any government since the 1970s, local government workers responded with a display of union power also unseen since that decade.

Yet both the long-awaited investment and the determination of local government employees to begin to reverse years of deterioration in relative earnings are manifestations of the same political trend.

It is marked by widespread determination to transform not only public services but also the lives of those who provide them. If it is to succeed, it needs to be guided by a judgement that those two goals, far from being mutually antagonistic, are indivisible. Instead, it looks as though the idea that the extra money will be used to relieve pressure on public service workers, and by doing so enable capacity such as hospital beds to be used more effectively, could push the government on to the defensive.

The critical tone was set in April, after the chancellor’s Budget foreshadowed the unprecedented scale of spending increases outlined in the spending review on 19 July.

Michael Saunders, an economist at City financial institution Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, calculated that 59 per cent of the extra cash spent by the government in the first three months of this year was absorbed by inflation, which is running at a much higher rate in the public than in the private sector.

“The surge in public sector inflation highlights the difficulty that the government faces in improving public services, which are labour intensive, at a time when the labour market is very tight,” he said.

The Conservatives have picked up on that theme, warning that, unless the government’s public service reform efforts drive up productivity, the extra money will disappear down a black hole.

Brown hardly needs Iain Duncan Smith to urge him on in his determination to tie the new money to new ways of delivering services, but he should pay more attention to a different IDS. The employment issues research unit, Income Data Services, has revealed the extent of the staff shortages facing social work alone.

In a report for the public service workers’ union Unison in May, IDS showed that vacancy rates for social workers are running at 15 per cent nationally, 40 per cent in London and higher still in the capital’s housing hot spots.

“Staff and clients are suffering from a system which is in danger of collapsing under the strain,” Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said. “Not enough people are joining the workforce and too many of those that do leave after two or three years burnt out and disillusioned.”

Prentis could have said much the same about any section of the public service workforce, but social workers are lagging behind even teachers, nurses and police officers, at whom cost of living supplements, location allowances and other special measures have been aimed.

“It must be heartbreaking for our members to know that despite carrying a heavy case-load, working long hours, taking work home and covering for staff shortages, it is just never enough,” Prentis said.

“And it must be frightening to know that if anything does go wrong, you will be vilified in the media and made a scapegoat by your employers. Is it any wonder that recruitment and retention difficulties for social workers are widespread?”

Union leaders are paid to say things like that, of course, and the government is sick of hearing them claim victim status for the “producer” side of the public service relationship when they want more focus on the “consumer”.

But much of the trouble for both arises from that very dichotomy, which might  have had some justification 20 years ago but now overlooks the fact that one of the main reasons why public service users are dissatisfied is that public service workers are too.
As Prentis has said: “It is ridiculous to imagine that investment in our public services should somehow be separate from investment in the very people who deliver them. It does mean a higher status, better rewarded workforce.

“And this doesn’t just mean doctors and nurses, vital as they are. It also means the armies of staff who bring dignity to the lives of so many - care workers, home helps, school staff, caretakers, dinner ladies and classroom assistants.”

Everyone wants dignity, but actually what is lacking is rather more basic than that. A picket line anecdote, passed on by a Unison activist, underlines the scale of one important aspect of the problem: low pay.

When check-out operators at a Somerfield store in the South West noticed that striking care workers were assembled outside a nearby local authority residential home, they expressed their solidarity by taking some food over. It turned out that some of the supermarket women had worked at that home but switched to the shop to earn more.

That causes problems not only for social care services, but also for the NHS. “The extra money in health will make little difference to the NHS waiting list if there are insufficient resources in the care sector,” says Prentis. “If social services can’t cope the NHS bears the brunt with bed blocking, waiting lists and cancelled operations.”

It is time to stop treating such statements of common sense as though they were special pleading by privileged public service workers. Perhaps there was a time they would have been, but those days are gone.

It is not just that low pay is contributing to staff shortages, but also that it combines with the effects of staff shortages to increase the pressure on those still in posts. That is driving up stress levels as much as it is driving down morale.

According to an NOP survey for Unison, two out of three local government workers have considered leaving their jobs in the past year, and more than half of care workers were seeking other jobs.

The main reason was that they felt undervalued (58 per cent); were dissatisfied with pay (45 per cent); had a lack of resources with which to do their jobs as well as they would like (42 per cent), and had a lack of promotion prospects (42 per cent).

Most revealing of all was that seven out of 10 felt that, compared with the same time last year, workload and pressure in their area or department had increased, and felt morale had got worse.

But there is much more to improving public services than improving the lot of their workers, and few would oppose the chancellor’s determination to get value for the extra money. Moreover, there is much more to the human resources dimension of the challenge than dealing with low or relatively declining pay.

Indeed, experience of public service reform in both the European Union and the US shows that one thing that does import well from the private sector is the value of creating “learning organisations” in which the knowledge and commitment of employees are valued, mobilised and systematically developed.

As Danish and Swedish social services have shown, money can be saved and outcomes improved simultaneously by developing modern structures and systems of team work and participatory management.

But first things first. If what Brown wants is more bangs for his bucks, he should be happy to start by filling the obvious gaps. Far from being a diversion from his mission to improve public services, tackling the recruitment, retention and low pay issues head on would be prudent.

- Brendan Martin is a specialist writer on public service reform and can be contacted at bmartin@publicworld.org