Public sector service productivity has collapsed 7.5% 2020-23. This is without precedent and means taxpayers need to pay more than £30bn a year extra for their services, with all the extra costs of inflation on top of that. No wonder public spending is so high. In an extreme case the Post Office, a nationalised...
We have discussed the strange agreement in much public debate that there are a defined number of public services which need to be in public ownership or control owing to their importance to our lives. These include the obvious ones of health and education, where it is a generally agreed fundamental that the state...
In the private sector attention is centred on what service or good the company provides. If I go to shop I do not want to be told how much the shop spends on buying and selling things and managing itself. I would not regard a shop that cost £1m to run each year as...
The Chancellor gave an important lecture recently on the need to raise public sector productivity. He drew attention to the decline in public service productivity by 5.7% compared to pre pandemic, whilst private services had shown a productivity improvement of 1.7% over the same time period. He raised the issue of the “10,000 public...
Rt Hon Sir John Redwood MP (Wokingham) (Con): Does the right hon. Member agree with me that if you wish to improve service you do not go on strike and if you wish to pay for higher wages you do not go on strike? Will he give that advice to the rail unions? Pat...
This is my latest Conservative Home article: When I go shopping I do not set out to maximise what I spend. If I tell friends and family I do not report that I have bought £70 of goods only to face a barrage of complaints that I had not spent £80 instead. I go...
Yesterday I gave my second lecture on the delivery of public services, following on from the All Souls lecture providing analysis of the different ways public service is delivered in the UK. Speaking at the IEA I reminded people of my main findings. Bread and circuses are as much public services as water and...
There are various risks which the private sector can take on where they might be better at managing them in a way which improves results and lowers costs. When designing a tender and negotiating with a provider the public sector needs to be careful to avoid the position where the private sector privatises the...
There was a bad reason for the Private Finance Initiative, and several good reasons. The bad reason was much used under the Blair/Brown Labour government. They wanted to pay for a number of new schools and hospitals without the capital cost appearing on the public accounts. They therefore asked the private sector to borrow...
The underlying principle of the main public services which is popular is the principle that the service is supplied free to the user, and paid for by taxpayers. This is true of most healthcare, of most school education, and many social services. No political party with serious aspirations to govern either locally or nationally...