Responding to the local election results, Keir Starmer said that he is determined to go ‘further and faster’. That will include his Government’s efforts to reform the Civil Service and the public sector.
The Prime Minister has been much sharper in his criticism of the public sector than his recent Conservative predecessors. After just five months in office, he pointed out that public sector productivity had fallen by 8.5% compared with just before the pandemic and said: ‘That wouldn’t be accepted in any other sector or walk of life.’ (He also took aim at civil servants, saying: ‘I do think too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.’)
The local elections are even more evidence that any government’s electoral fortunes now depend on visible improvements in public services together with meaningful efficiencies that can bring down the record tax burden. Ministers regularly say that NHS waiting lists have fallen for the last six months but the actual fall has been around 30,000 per month out of a total list of 7.5 million (about 0.4% per month). They need improvements on a wholly different scale to that.
The Government badly lacks a plan for public sector change. It should be based on evidence of real success and productivity gains. This week, the Effective Governance Forum published a case study of an outstanding example, HMP Oakwood, the largest prison in England and Wales.
Oakwood bucks every trend. Across the whole prison estate, prisoner assaults on staff have risen by a third since 2020. At Oakwood, violence has fallen by a quarter. Most prisons have struggled to reintroduce rehabilitative regimes following the pandemic. At Oakwood, rehabilitation is built into prison life. Prisoners are given every opportunity to lead workshops, with gardens, media production suites and many other activities that prepare them for a successful life post-release. Because it runs so efficiently, its cost per prisoner is £18,000 per year against the average for prisons of its type of £30,000. (As the chief inspector of prisons wrote last year: ‘It shows that cash isn’t everything.’)
The lesson for government is that Oakwood’s success can be repeated across the public sector, because it is based on the basic principles of effective management. Its leaders commit to a vision, in this case of a rehabilitative, working prison. They set objectives and measure performance. They encourage new ideas: Iceland Foods has just opened a store in Oakwood with prisoner managers and employees. And Oakwood has stable leadership. It has had two governors since 2013, during which time there have been 11 secretaries for state for justice and 14 prisons ministers.
The same principles of management lie behind other examples of public sector success. The most obvious is the improvement in schools since 2010. Successive governments gave more management freedom to headteachers, including over the curriculum – first under the grant-maintained schools initiative, and then the similar academies programme.
But in general public services continue to neglect the role of management. This includes the largest public service, the NHS, as the Messenger Review pointed out in 2022 (‘there has developed over time an institutional inadequacy in the way that leadership and management is trained, developed and valued’).
Crucially it also includes Whitehall. In 1968, the Fulton Report called for the introduction of ‘accountable management’ in government departments (with explicit objectives and ‘highly qualified, experienced staff’ able to manage). 57 years on, we are still waiting. Whitehall still sees the job of running public services as 80% policy and 20% delivery. As Oakwood shows, it is the other way round.
Last month, the Government took a very positive step in appointing Samantha Jones, an experienced NHS and private sector manager, to be permanent secretary of the Department of Health and Social Care. Even better would be to appoint her in a new chief executive role, alongside a secretary of state (giving strategic leadership) and a permanent secretary (giving policy advice). That model can then be replicated across Whitehall.
The Prime Minister needs a new approach. Although good management is hardly a revolutionary idea, its long-overdue application would be a revolution in government. It would take time to bed in a culture of management and performance, but the Prime Minister should expect visible results in public services well before the next election.
Read the EGF’s report ‘Solving the prison crisis’ here.
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