Slow payment of invoices - is this a French thing? I have a design / build / operate deal for a webstore owned by the French bit of Big Client group. I shoulder all operating expenses and we swap invoices (they invoice for all the stock sold, albeit free issued). They're now 3 months late paying and making excuses. If it wasn't for the other projects I'm doing for Mexican and Spanish bits of the group I'd be tempted to just stop until they cough up.
I remember doing an international arbitration where the French respondents denied even receiving the invoices that they had not paid. They opened up their file and there they were. They were not even slightly embarrassed by this. We were ready to leave the room. It is a different mind set.
In my private work the worst payers are lawyers. I once waited 2 years to be paid for a medicolegal report. Shortly after I was paid, the same firm wanted me to do a further report. I declined it.
I insisted on payment before I released the report in the future.
Slow payment of invoices - is this a French thing? I have a design / build / operate deal for a webstore owned by the French bit of Big Client group. I shoulder all operating expenses and we swap invoices (they invoice for all the stock sold, albeit free issued). They're now 3 months late paying and making excuses. If it wasn't for the other projects I'm doing for Mexican and Spanish bits of the group I'd be tempted to just stop until they cough up.
Nope it is very much a British thing as well. In the building trade it has long been common practice to drive small suppliers into bankruptcy by delaying payments. And big companies are doing it more and more commonly in many industries. A number of big multinational companies in the Oil and Gas sector have moved from 30 day payment to 90 day payment without warning.
Really? Shell, BP and Total used to be pretty good payers, historically. (Not Eni. But that's another story.)
Danielle R. Sassoon, Manhattan’s acting U.S. attorney, resigned on Thursday rather than obey a Justice Department order that she drop a corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, that she had championed, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Holy Shit. They're burning through people pretty fast now. After Sassoon refused/resigned, the next two people - heads of Public Integrity Section (DC) and the Criminal Division also refused/resigned. This all JUST happened. And these are all 'actings', so they're people the Trump crew chose.
I don't quite understand why Trump has gone into bat for Eric Adams in the first place.
It is total banana republic stuff that we have seen from both Biden and Trump over the past couple of months in regards to criminal cases.
Is it more complicated than Trump believes himself to have been persecuted, so he supports those who have also been 'targeted'? I think he defended Menendez as well? And that corrupt pos was stashing gold bars around the place (he'll probably get off on appeal).
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
You are comparing nominal and actual. So, a 10% wage increase is entirely justified if we have 10% inflation simply to retain the real value of the wage. It does not mean that there needs to be a cut in headcount as well. Of course management should always be looking to reduce headcount where possible regardless of what people are being paid.
I am highly sympathetic to some of your points. I fear WFH, combined with an anxiety about everyone's mental health and work life balance simply means that it is a lot easier not to work as hard as you do in an office where your output is readily assessable and comparable.
But you are sounding like Elon Musk. A more measured and focused way to address these problems is needed.
Somewhat contradictory - my productivity went way up when I started WFH. Then $work brought in 'professional' management from the private sector. At which point my productivity plummeted due to endless meetings and 'process' being added to every facet of the work day so that it could all be 'measured' in some way.
I think there are just bad WFH experiences and also good ones, bad and good management, etc. I'm not sure everyone being in an office makes that much difference. Slackers gonna slack.
Just to tie it round to the AI/LLM chat, I was amused to see a demo of the Claude 'computer use' agent which got bored with the task it had been given and ended up just browsing photo's of Yosemite Park on google images.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
You are comparing nominal and actual. So, a 10% wage increase is entirely justified if we have 10% inflation simply to retain the real value of the wage. It does not mean that there needs to be a cut in headcount as well. Of course management should always be looking to reduce headcount where possible regardless of what people are being paid.
I am highly sympathetic to some of your points. I fear WFH, combined with an anxiety about everyone's mental health and work life balance simply means that it is a lot easier not to work as hard as you do in an office where your output is readily assessable and comparable.
But you are sounding like Elon Musk. A more measured and focused way to address these problems is needed.
The problem, David, is that we've tried "measured and focussed" and it hasn't worked. Sometimes you need to throw a bit of dynamite in the water to catch the fish. We're well past that stage now, £127bn in borrowing, record tax rate, growth slowing to a crawl. Something has got to give and cutting spending by slashing jobs in the state is the only sane route left. 1m extra workers and no extra output is where we're at.
We made some serious progress in this direction during the Coalition years with Osborne's hated austerity programs that drove head count and expenses down sharply. Part of the problem since 2019 is that so much of that work has been unwound, not least under the Tory government post 2019. Its hard, grinding, unpopular work. I think it used to be called "government" but it went out of fashion.
I am not holding my breath for Reeves attempting anything similar.
Yes but I'm not sure austerity actually drove productivity. I think it just reduced outputs (but in a way that was hidden for a decade or so, and that we are now struggling to cope with).
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
Careful - there was a study going round that showed the massive cut in middle management from 2010 onwards led to consultants doing loads of paperwork, killing productivity.
I don't have an answer to NHS productivity but it would be easy to make things much, much worse. It remains in international terms a decent service for the relatively small proportion of GDP we devote to it. It's the underlying growth rates in spending, particularly in secondary care, that are so worrying.
As I've said before, we need to rip the plaster off and freeze hospital spending, increase it for public health and primary care.
That's pretty much Streetings plans. The money goes to Primary care and public health. . It's probably correct too, but a courageous decision as they say in Yes Minister.
No one who is medically fit to leave hospital should be there. We have to sort social care so it doesn’t happen. Each hospital bed costs vast sums so needs to be free for those who need the care.
This may be a very naive question but why can't the medically fit be discharged into hotels? Are hospitals less expensive than decent hotels?
A bit more than maid service is generally needed.
My Trust has just opened its own 70 bed Social Care home.
Only a cynic would suggest that it is deliberately poor in order to incentivise residents to move elsewhere...
Cynic.
"why can't the medically fit be discharged into hotels? Are hospitals less expensive than decent hotels?"
Have you ever been involved with a hospital discharge for someone who almost certainly needs social care?
Maybe I have had a bad couple of experiences in my family but the nhs bureaucracy in these cases is off the fucking scale.
Meetings involving half a dozen, sometimes more, health professionals - OT, social services, physiotherapy, mental health, dietician*, 'consultant's-representative-on-earth', notes from the GP and... drum roll... a Discharge Co-ordinator Officer who is gamely trying to keep track of all these people etc.
I have literally had a family member case where the consultant threatened to use the little know 'discharge with risk' clause to cut through the absolute crap she was faced with in order to get her hands on bed for someone who was really needing medical help.
Everyone in the room is ticking boxes on ipads or sheets of paper and uming and arghing and saying things like 'you know, but what if...' and 'have we considered...'
Slow payment of invoices - is this a French thing? I have a design / build / operate deal for a webstore owned by the French bit of Big Client group. I shoulder all operating expenses and we swap invoices (they invoice for all the stock sold, albeit free issued). They're now 3 months late paying and making excuses. If it wasn't for the other projects I'm doing for Mexican and Spanish bits of the group I'd be tempted to just stop until they cough up.
I remember doing an international arbitration where the French respondents denied even receiving the invoices that they had not paid. They opened up their file and there they were. They were not even slightly embarrassed by this. We were ready to leave the room. It is a different mind set.
Edit, on a more practical level, if the contract is subject to UK law, start sending them invoices for the interest due in terms of the Late Payment of Commercial Debts Act 1998. That might get their attention.
They'd lose that as well. Its ok - I know exactly where this is stuck. I manage some customers for them. Invoices received and passed onto France to pay. I've been over to see the finance team twice to have them explain their preferred process to me. Twice because they changed it after the first one. This time? Yep, changed again.
I'm sending invoices to the guy in the finance office they told me to send them to. This guy - after ignoring me for weeks - now says I should be sending invoices to this other guy. Who I know sits a few desks away and works in the same office in the same team.
Their customer now threatening legal action for non-payment (as you suggest I do). Has the first guy passed the invoices onto his colleague a few desks away? Has he fu
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
The US is now keen to disincentivize electric vehicles:
If this was genuinely about a concern about vehicle weight, they could actually, you know, charge according to vehicle weight.
One of the FUD tropes is that EVs are so heavy that they are damaging roads. I presume that in Murica they're suggesting that Tesla are heavier than F150s etc which is so painfully funny until you remember who is saying it.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Where does this strange fantasy come that no-one in the public sector is interested in making savings? Budgets are tight. Public sector bodies are constantly looking to see how they can cut costs. Politicians are always demanding cuts where possible.
The ONS literally said that productivity is down 8.4% overall and 18.4% in the NHS vs pre-covid. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want, it's not me saying this, it's the government's own bloody statistics body. I guarantee you that they don't look to cut costs the same way the private sector does. Early in my career my then employer cut 15% of jobs globally, resulting in 45k people being let go including about 50 people in my location, I survived by virtue of being cheap to employ. Since then that company has gone from a valuation of ~$12bn to around $140bn and many people place the start of the turnaround on that first big round of job cuts. In which world will the government announce 15% job losses across the state?
Do you have a link to the ONS report? How do they measure the output of a public sector employee?
Figure 8 shoes that NHS productivity was growing quite a bit in the run up to the pandemic, up nearly 25% compared with 1997. Given overall productivity growth has been rubbish, you might actually find the NHS is ... 👀
Not really, you are talking about a 25% increase in productivity over 22 years, not much more than 1% a year and all of which was lost as a result of Covid. Our current productivity seems to be at exactly the same level as it was in 1997, surely a truly appalling result given the advances in technology in that time.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
You are comparing nominal and actual. So, a 10% wage increase is entirely justified if we have 10% inflation simply to retain the real value of the wage. It does not mean that there needs to be a cut in headcount as well. Of course management should always be looking to reduce headcount where possible regardless of what people are being paid.
I am highly sympathetic to some of your points. I fear WFH, combined with an anxiety about everyone's mental health and work life balance simply means that it is a lot easier not to work as hard as you do in an office where your output is readily assessable and comparable.
But you are sounding like Elon Musk. A more measured and focused way to address these problems is needed.
The problem, David, is that we've tried "measured and focussed" and it hasn't worked. Sometimes you need to throw a bit of dynamite in the water to catch the fish. We're well past that stage now, £127bn in borrowing, record tax rate, growth slowing to a crawl. Something has got to give and cutting spending by slashing jobs in the state is the only sane route left. 1m extra workers and no extra output is where we're at.
We made some serious progress in this direction during the Coalition years with Osborne's hated austerity programs that drove head count and expenses down sharply. Part of the problem since 2019 is that so much of that work has been unwound, not least under the Tory government post 2019. Its hard, grinding, unpopular work. I think it used to be called "government" but it went out of fashion.
I am not holding my breath for Reeves attempting anything similar.
Yes but I'm not sure austerity actually drove productivity. I think it just reduced outputs (but in a way that was hidden for a decade or so, and that we are now struggling to cope with).
Yes, it's like cutting maintenance. For a year or two you can get away with it, but eventually it saps productivity.
Same with the cuts to training, buildings and capital. Eventually it makes an impact.
Slow payment of invoices - is this a French thing? I have a design / build / operate deal for a webstore owned by the French bit of Big Client group. I shoulder all operating expenses and we swap invoices (they invoice for all the stock sold, albeit free issued). They're now 3 months late paying and making excuses. If it wasn't for the other projects I'm doing for Mexican and Spanish bits of the group I'd be tempted to just stop until they cough up.
I remember doing an international arbitration where the French respondents denied even receiving the invoices that they had not paid. They opened up their file and there they were. They were not even slightly embarrassed by this. We were ready to leave the room. It is a different mind set.
In my private work the worst payers are lawyers. I once waited 2 years to be paid for a medicolegal report. Shortly after I was paid, the same firm wanted me to do a further report. I declined it.
I insisted on payment before I released the report in the future.
Presumably that was for a legal aid case, the lawyer would have been waiting as long, if not longer, to be paid their fees and costs (inc yours).
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
You are comparing nominal and actual. So, a 10% wage increase is entirely justified if we have 10% inflation simply to retain the real value of the wage. It does not mean that there needs to be a cut in headcount as well. Of course management should always be looking to reduce headcount where possible regardless of what people are being paid.
I am highly sympathetic to some of your points. I fear WFH, combined with an anxiety about everyone's mental health and work life balance simply means that it is a lot easier not to work as hard as you do in an office where your output is readily assessable and comparable.
But you are sounding like Elon Musk. A more measured and focused way to address these problems is needed.
The problem, David, is that we've tried "measured and focussed" and it hasn't worked. Sometimes you need to throw a bit of dynamite in the water to catch the fish. We're well past that stage now, £127bn in borrowing, record tax rate, growth slowing to a crawl. Something has got to give and cutting spending by slashing jobs in the state is the only sane route left. 1m extra workers and no extra output is where we're at.
We made some serious progress in this direction during the Coalition years with Osborne's hated austerity programs that drove head count and expenses down sharply. Part of the problem since 2019 is that so much of that work has been unwound, not least under the Tory government post 2019. Its hard, grinding, unpopular work. I think it used to be called "government" but it went out of fashion.
I am not holding my breath for Reeves attempting anything similar.
Yes but I'm not sure austerity actually drove productivity. I think it just reduced outputs (but in a way that was hidden for a decade or so, and that we are now struggling to cope with).
Yes, it's like cutting maintenance. For a year or two you can get away with it, but eventually it saps productivity.
Same with the cuts to training, buildings and capital. Eventually it makes an impact.
This is what I don't understand with so much of public spending. "Lets make a cut" they say. But when you look beyond the immediate the cut means you spend more money. Its so stupid.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
Slow payment of invoices - is this a French thing? I have a design / build / operate deal for a webstore owned by the French bit of Big Client group. I shoulder all operating expenses and we swap invoices (they invoice for all the stock sold, albeit free issued). They're now 3 months late paying and making excuses. If it wasn't for the other projects I'm doing for Mexican and Spanish bits of the group I'd be tempted to just stop until they cough up.
I remember doing an international arbitration where the French respondents denied even receiving the invoices that they had not paid. They opened up their file and there they were. They were not even slightly embarrassed by this. We were ready to leave the room. It is a different mind set.
In my private work the worst payers are lawyers. I once waited 2 years to be paid for a medicolegal report. Shortly after I was paid, the same firm wanted me to do a further report. I declined it.
I insisted on payment before I released the report in the future.
Presumably that was for a legal aid case, the lawyer would have been waiting as long, if not longer, to be paid their fees and costs (inc yours).
I don't think legal aid exists for medicolegal, it's pretty much entirely contingent fee.
So yes, I don't think the legal firm had been paid either, but that is their choice not mine.
Slow payment of invoices - is this a French thing? I have a design / build / operate deal for a webstore owned by the French bit of Big Client group. I shoulder all operating expenses and we swap invoices (they invoice for all the stock sold, albeit free issued). They're now 3 months late paying and making excuses. If it wasn't for the other projects I'm doing for Mexican and Spanish bits of the group I'd be tempted to just stop until they cough up.
I remember doing an international arbitration where the French respondents denied even receiving the invoices that they had not paid. They opened up their file and there they were. They were not even slightly embarrassed by this. We were ready to leave the room. It is a different mind set.
In my private work the worst payers are lawyers. I once waited 2 years to be paid for a medicolegal report. Shortly after I was paid, the same firm wanted me to do a further report. I declined it.
I insisted on payment before I released the report in the future.
The key in medico-legal reports is to ascertain how they are being paid for before you do the work. If they are relying upon third party funders they will want you to wait until they have been paid which will not be before the end of the case. Legal firms are very reluctant to pay such outlays with their own money for obvious reasons. If they are funding it or, in the rare case, the client is funding it on a pay as you go basis payment should come more quickly.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
You are comparing nominal and actual. So, a 10% wage increase is entirely justified if we have 10% inflation simply to retain the real value of the wage. It does not mean that there needs to be a cut in headcount as well. Of course management should always be looking to reduce headcount where possible regardless of what people are being paid.
I am highly sympathetic to some of your points. I fear WFH, combined with an anxiety about everyone's mental health and work life balance simply means that it is a lot easier not to work as hard as you do in an office where your output is readily assessable and comparable.
But you are sounding like Elon Musk. A more measured and focused way to address these problems is needed.
The problem, David, is that we've tried "measured and focussed" and it hasn't worked. Sometimes you need to throw a bit of dynamite in the water to catch the fish. We're well past that stage now, £127bn in borrowing, record tax rate, growth slowing to a crawl. Something has got to give and cutting spending by slashing jobs in the state is the only sane route left. 1m extra workers and no extra output is where we're at.
We made some serious progress in this direction during the Coalition years with Osborne's hated austerity programs that drove head count and expenses down sharply. Part of the problem since 2019 is that so much of that work has been unwound, not least under the Tory government post 2019. Its hard, grinding, unpopular work. I think it used to be called "government" but it went out of fashion.
I am not holding my breath for Reeves attempting anything similar.
Yes but I'm not sure austerity actually drove productivity. I think it just reduced outputs (but in a way that was hidden for a decade or so, and that we are now struggling to cope with).
Yes, it's like cutting maintenance. For a year or two you can get away with it, but eventually it saps productivity.
Same with the cuts to training, buildings and capital. Eventually it makes an impact.
This is what I don't understand with so much of public spending. "Lets make a cut" they say. But when you look beyond the immediate the cut means you spend more money. Its so stupid.
But it's future-you that has to spend more money, and future-you might be future-someone-else anyway.
That's the trouble with the state we are in. The best solutions to our problems involve a time machine and taking less short-sighted decisions a few decades ago.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Where does this strange fantasy come that no-one in the public sector is interested in making savings? Budgets are tight. Public sector bodies are constantly looking to see how they can cut costs. Politicians are always demanding cuts where possible.
The ONS literally said that productivity is down 8.4% overall and 18.4% in the NHS vs pre-covid. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want, it's not me saying this, it's the government's own bloody statistics body. I guarantee you that they don't look to cut costs the same way the private sector does. Early in my career my then employer cut 15% of jobs globally, resulting in 45k people being let go including about 50 people in my location, I survived by virtue of being cheap to employ. Since then that company has gone from a valuation of ~$12bn to around $140bn and many people place the start of the turnaround on that first big round of job cuts. In which world will the government announce 15% job losses across the state?
Do you have a link to the ONS report? How do they measure the output of a public sector employee?
Figure 8 shoes that NHS productivity was growing quite a bit in the run up to the pandemic, up nearly 25% compared with 1997. Given overall productivity growth has been rubbish, you might actually find the NHS is ... 👀
Not really, you are talking about a 25% increase in productivity over 22 years, not much more than 1% a year and all of which was lost as a result of Covid. Our current productivity seems to be at exactly the same level as it was in 1997, surely a truly appalling result given the advances in technology in that time.
I am extremely sceptical of a lot of these statistics.
So: the NHS accounted for 10.4% of GDP in Fiscal 2024, against 10.0% in 2019. That trend - rising healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP - has happened everywhere in the world, and reflects a whole bunch of things.
When we say that productivity has fallen by 18% relative to pre-Covid, what are we saying? Are people recieving 18% less healthcare (and how do we bake in the effects of an ageing population)?
And the ONS report is vague, and does a very poor job of explaining how it gets its conclusions.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Where does this strange fantasy come that no-one in the public sector is interested in making savings? Budgets are tight. Public sector bodies are constantly looking to see how they can cut costs. Politicians are always demanding cuts where possible.
The ONS literally said that productivity is down 8.4% overall and 18.4% in the NHS vs pre-covid. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want, it's not me saying this, it's the government's own bloody statistics body. I guarantee you that they don't look to cut costs the same way the private sector does. Early in my career my then employer cut 15% of jobs globally, resulting in 45k people being let go including about 50 people in my location, I survived by virtue of being cheap to employ. Since then that company has gone from a valuation of ~$12bn to around $140bn and many people place the start of the turnaround on that first big round of job cuts. In which world will the government announce 15% job losses across the state?
Do you have a link to the ONS report? How do they measure the output of a public sector employee?
Figure 8 shoes that NHS productivity was growing quite a bit in the run up to the pandemic, up nearly 25% compared with 1997. Given overall productivity growth has been rubbish, you might actually find the NHS is ... 👀
Not really, you are talking about a 25% increase in productivity over 22 years, not much more than 1% a year and all of which was lost as a result of Covid. Our current productivity seems to be at exactly the same level as it was in 1997, surely a truly appalling result given the advances in technology in that time.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
That works well in London, but very poorly in towns where there is only the population for one (or maybe two) secondary schools.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
You are comparing nominal and actual. So, a 10% wage increase is entirely justified if we have 10% inflation simply to retain the real value of the wage. It does not mean that there needs to be a cut in headcount as well. Of course management should always be looking to reduce headcount where possible regardless of what people are being paid.
I am highly sympathetic to some of your points. I fear WFH, combined with an anxiety about everyone's mental health and work life balance simply means that it is a lot easier not to work as hard as you do in an office where your output is readily assessable and comparable.
But you are sounding like Elon Musk. A more measured and focused way to address these problems is needed.
Somewhat contradictory - my productivity went way up when I started WFH. Then $work brought in 'professional' management from the private sector. At which point my productivity plummeted due to endless meetings and 'process' being added to every facet of the work day so that it could all be 'measured' in some way.
I think there are just bad WFH experiences and also good ones, bad and good management, etc. I'm not sure everyone being in an office makes that much difference. Slackers gonna slack.
Just to tie it round to the AI/LLM chat, I was amused to see a demo of the Claude 'computer use' agent which got bored with the task it had been given and ended up just browsing photo's of Yosemite Park on google images.
Like the office worker it dreams of replacing.
I was working from home for various clients for the best part of 8 years before the pandemic. They all wanted me in their offices and when I said they should look elsewhere they all backed down and accepted I should work from home for them with occasional visits. The trick is to be absolutely scrupulous with your hours and show them that they get a better service. Given the work was often 24/7 on call it was the only practical way to work things. I always used to warn clients (and was proved right) that I would be less productive on those weeks when I was in the office because of the unavoidable distractions from the job at hand - not least the pointless meetings they would continually organise.
If you are disciplined and genuinely wanting to get the work done then working from home can very much be the better option.
I feel obliged to make a point I have made before. All these fit, healthy, slim people are still going to die and if they don't die of the diseases of obesity they will die of something else which just might prove even more expensive to treat.
Its not about one thing. People will be happier. People will work longer and more effectively generating tax. Happier, productive people will be less likely to vote for Putinista shills.
Not really.
Firstly, even if they work longer they are more likely to live longer as pensioners with all the consequential costs. Socially committed and caring people like my parents smoked themselves to death and died at 66 and 67 having received almost no pension for all the NI they paid over their working lives. Kerching.
Neither of them needed any care costs either other than a bit of help for my mum with her terminal cancer. Kerching kerching.
I suppose its possible that those who don't drink, eat plenty of fish and exercise regularly are happier but I have yet to see much convincing evidence of this. I have seen even less evidence that they are less likely to vote for loons like Trump or Farage.
Type 2 diabetes has one of the highest shares of NHS costs of all diseases and is associated with obesity. Obesity is expensive for the state.
But, yes, from an entirely Machiavellian point of view, smoking is great. I do, however, think the point of government is to make our lives better, not just to save money by killing us off before we draw upon our pensions.
EXCL: Education Minister Stephen Morgan ran a vile WhatsApp group which branded pensioners “terrorists”, hurled abuse at colleagues and shared memes of ex-PM Rishi Sunak being deported to Rwanda.
I'd love to know how pensioners qualify as terrorists. Isn't there an organisation that deradicalises people? I'm 76 so when is my referral coming?
Good evening, everybody.
Good evening! Just called to dinner (woodpigeon breasts - doing our thing for local agriculture and food security).
Partridge en croute tonight for me. First meal home after more than month away offshore where the food is decent enough in a transport caff sort of way.
I made a very tasty chicken risotto tonight. Apologies to PB for not going with a more exotic bird.
Sounds smashing. Nothing wrong with chicken. Its just that we get the game birds for free so for us it is the cheap option.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Where does this strange fantasy come that no-one in the public sector is interested in making savings? Budgets are tight. Public sector bodies are constantly looking to see how they can cut costs. Politicians are always demanding cuts where possible.
The ONS literally said that productivity is down 8.4% overall and 18.4% in the NHS vs pre-covid. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want, it's not me saying this, it's the government's own bloody statistics body. I guarantee you that they don't look to cut costs the same way the private sector does. Early in my career my then employer cut 15% of jobs globally, resulting in 45k people being let go including about 50 people in my location, I survived by virtue of being cheap to employ. Since then that company has gone from a valuation of ~$12bn to around $140bn and many people place the start of the turnaround on that first big round of job cuts. In which world will the government announce 15% job losses across the state?
Do you have a link to the ONS report? How do they measure the output of a public sector employee?
Figure 8 shoes that NHS productivity was growing quite a bit in the run up to the pandemic, up nearly 25% compared with 1997. Given overall productivity growth has been rubbish, you might actually find the NHS is ... 👀
Not really, you are talking about a 25% increase in productivity over 22 years, not much more than 1% a year and all of which was lost as a result of Covid. Our current productivity seems to be at exactly the same level as it was in 1997, surely a truly appalling result given the advances in technology in that time.
I am extremely sceptical of a lot of these statistics.
So: the NHS accounted for 10.4% of GDP in Fiscal 2024, against 10.0% in 2019. That trend - rising healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP - has happened everywhere in the world, and reflects a whole bunch of things.
When we say that productivity has fallen by 18% relative to pre-Covid, what are we saying? Are people recieving 18% less healthcare (and how do we bake in the effects of an ageing population)?
And the ONS report is vague, and does a very poor job of explaining how it gets its conclusions.
I share some of your suspicions but I welcome the fact that the ONS is turning their mind to this. Hopefully the quality of the data will improve over time.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Where does this strange fantasy come that no-one in the public sector is interested in making savings? Budgets are tight. Public sector bodies are constantly looking to see how they can cut costs. Politicians are always demanding cuts where possible.
The ONS literally said that productivity is down 8.4% overall and 18.4% in the NHS vs pre-covid. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want, it's not me saying this, it's the government's own bloody statistics body. I guarantee you that they don't look to cut costs the same way the private sector does. Early in my career my then employer cut 15% of jobs globally, resulting in 45k people being let go including about 50 people in my location, I survived by virtue of being cheap to employ. Since then that company has gone from a valuation of ~$12bn to around $140bn and many people place the start of the turnaround on that first big round of job cuts. In which world will the government announce 15% job losses across the state?
Do you have a link to the ONS report? How do they measure the output of a public sector employee?
Figure 8 shoes that NHS productivity was growing quite a bit in the run up to the pandemic, up nearly 25% compared with 1997. Given overall productivity growth has been rubbish, you might actually find the NHS is ... 👀
Not really, you are talking about a 25% increase in productivity over 22 years, not much more than 1% a year and all of which was lost as a result of Covid. Our current productivity seems to be at exactly the same level as it was in 1997, surely a truly appalling result given the advances in technology in that time.
I am extremely sceptical of a lot of these statistics.
So: the NHS accounted for 10.4% of GDP in Fiscal 2024, against 10.0% in 2019. That trend - rising healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP - has happened everywhere in the world, and reflects a whole bunch of things.
When we say that productivity has fallen by 18% relative to pre-Covid, what are we saying? Are people recieving 18% less healthcare (and how do we bake in the effects of an ageing population)?
And the ONS report is vague, and does a very poor job of explaining how it gets its conclusions.
Given the huge increase in waiting lists maybe the answer is that the ONS have it right and the NHS is just delivering less healthcare per dollar spent?
Slow payment of invoices - is this a French thing? I have a design / build / operate deal for a webstore owned by the French bit of Big Client group. I shoulder all operating expenses and we swap invoices (they invoice for all the stock sold, albeit free issued). They're now 3 months late paying and making excuses. If it wasn't for the other projects I'm doing for Mexican and Spanish bits of the group I'd be tempted to just stop until they cough up.
Nope it is very much a British thing as well. In the building trade it has long been common practice to drive small suppliers into bankruptcy by delaying payments. And big companies are doing it more and more commonly in many industries. A number of big multinational companies in the Oil and Gas sector have moved from 30 day payment to 90 day payment without warning.
Really? Shell, BP and Total used to be pretty good payers, historically. (Not Eni. But that's another story.)
Two of those (I won't tell you which ones) are exacty the companies I was thinking of who have moved from 30 day to 90 day payments. One of them is now having real difficulty getting people to do the work because both the payment conditions and the other requirents are so onerous.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
That works well in London, but very poorly in towns where there is only the population for one (or maybe two) secondary schools.
You could go really radical and run a lot more of school within a VR-type environment so physical location is unimportant. But then you realise that schools are doing a lot more than educating kids: they're socialising them; institutionalising them (in some healthy and some not so healthy ways); and forcing them to take a modicum of exercise, amongst other things.
@MaxPB what is wrong with you? You have lost all reason and are on a “I hate everyone and everything” crusade. The private sector does recognise that some roles are more productive at home. It isn’t all or nothing in either the private or public sector.
Sweeping job cuts and “efficiency savings” do not always work in the private sector. You sound like an overpaid and overvalued management consultant.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Where does this strange fantasy come that no-one in the public sector is interested in making savings? Budgets are tight. Public sector bodies are constantly looking to see how they can cut costs. Politicians are always demanding cuts where possible.
The ONS literally said that productivity is down 8.4% overall and 18.4% in the NHS vs pre-covid. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want, it's not me saying this, it's the government's own bloody statistics body. I guarantee you that they don't look to cut costs the same way the private sector does. Early in my career my then employer cut 15% of jobs globally, resulting in 45k people being let go including about 50 people in my location, I survived by virtue of being cheap to employ. Since then that company has gone from a valuation of ~$12bn to around $140bn and many people place the start of the turnaround on that first big round of job cuts. In which world will the government announce 15% job losses across the state?
Do you have a link to the ONS report? How do they measure the output of a public sector employee?
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
That works well in London, but very poorly in towns where there is only the population for one (or maybe two) secondary schools.
Allow parents to open their own schools to compete with the shit local ones. Schooling is an area where competition and consolidation could work wonders. Families are pretty mobile when it comes to education, I mean we're going all the way to Switzerland for it, though I admit I have means that others don't. Either way there is nothing to fear from opening up the education sector to competition and consolidation.
Slow payment of invoices - is this a French thing? I have a design / build / operate deal for a webstore owned by the French bit of Big Client group. I shoulder all operating expenses and we swap invoices (they invoice for all the stock sold, albeit free issued). They're now 3 months late paying and making excuses. If it wasn't for the other projects I'm doing for Mexican and Spanish bits of the group I'd be tempted to just stop until they cough up.
Nope it is very much a British thing as well. In the building trade it has long been common practice to drive small suppliers into bankruptcy by delaying payments. And big companies are doing it more and more commonly in many industries. A number of big multinational companies in the Oil and Gas sector have moved from 30 day payment to 90 day payment without warning.
Really? Shell, BP and Total used to be pretty good payers, historically. (Not Eni. But that's another story.)
Two of those (I won't tell you which ones) are exacty the companies I was thinking of who have moved from 30 day to 90 day payments. One of them is now having real difficulty getting people to do the work because both the payment conditions and the other requirents are so onerous.
Smash and grab adjudications seem to have sped up payments in the construction industry in my experience
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Where does this strange fantasy come that no-one in the public sector is interested in making savings? Budgets are tight. Public sector bodies are constantly looking to see how they can cut costs. Politicians are always demanding cuts where possible.
The ONS literally said that productivity is down 8.4% overall and 18.4% in the NHS vs pre-covid. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want, it's not me saying this, it's the government's own bloody statistics body. I guarantee you that they don't look to cut costs the same way the private sector does. Early in my career my then employer cut 15% of jobs globally, resulting in 45k people being let go including about 50 people in my location, I survived by virtue of being cheap to employ. Since then that company has gone from a valuation of ~$12bn to around $140bn and many people place the start of the turnaround on that first big round of job cuts. In which world will the government announce 15% job losses across the state?
Do you have a link to the ONS report? How do they measure the output of a public sector employee?
Figure 8 shoes that NHS productivity was growing quite a bit in the run up to the pandemic, up nearly 25% compared with 1997. Given overall productivity growth has been rubbish, you might actually find the NHS is ... 👀
Not really, you are talking about a 25% increase in productivity over 22 years, not much more than 1% a year and all of which was lost as a result of Covid. Our current productivity seems to be at exactly the same level as it was in 1997, surely a truly appalling result given the advances in technology in that time.
Danielle R. Sassoon, Manhattan’s acting U.S. attorney, resigned on Thursday rather than obey a Justice Department order that she drop a corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, that she had championed, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Holy Shit. They're burning through people pretty fast now. After Sassoon refused/resigned, the next two people - heads of Public Integrity Section (DC) and the Criminal Division also refused/resigned. This all JUST happened. And these are all 'actings', so they're people the Trump crew chose.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
That works well in London, but very poorly in towns where there is only the population for one (or maybe two) secondary schools.
Allow parents to open their own schools to compete with the shit local ones. Schooling is an area where competition and consolidation could work wonders. Families are pretty mobile when it comes to education, I mean we're going all the way to Switzerland for it, though I admit I have means that others don't. Either way there is nothing to fear from opening up the education sector to competition and consolidation.
I think at some point you need to take a breath and accept that some problems are sticky and not amenable to easy solutions. Choice within education is very much one of those areas. The sunk costs in closing a poor school (rather than improving it) and opening another one (which, if parent-led will probably be even more shit) are huge.
Slow payment of invoices - is this a French thing? I have a design / build / operate deal for a webstore owned by the French bit of Big Client group. I shoulder all operating expenses and we swap invoices (they invoice for all the stock sold, albeit free issued). They're now 3 months late paying and making excuses. If it wasn't for the other projects I'm doing for Mexican and Spanish bits of the group I'd be tempted to just stop until they cough up.
I remember doing an international arbitration where the French respondents denied even receiving the invoices that they had not paid. They opened up their file and there they were. They were not even slightly embarrassed by this. We were ready to leave the room. It is a different mind set.
In my private work the worst payers are lawyers. I once waited 2 years to be paid for a medicolegal report. Shortly after I was paid, the same firm wanted me to do a further report. I declined it.
I insisted on payment before I released the report in the future.
Presumably that was for a legal aid case, the lawyer would have been waiting as long, if not longer, to be paid their fees and costs (inc yours).
I don't think legal aid exists for medicolegal, it's pretty much entirely contingent fee.
So yes, I don't think the legal firm had been paid either, but that is their choice not mine.
No payment, no report. My terms are simple now.
The labourer is worthy of his hire.
And not that it's anything to do with you, but such legal chiselling does raise questions about the quality of justice if one is poor (or if one is not poor but not rich and has to spend half the house on defence against an unfair prosecution). If Lucy Letby was on legal aid, for instance, the chorus of "why didn't her defence bring up this statistical issue and that issue at the trial" on PB takes on a rather different meaning, given that lawyers are not normally specialist medical statisticians.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
There's nothing inherently stopping parents moving their children whenever they like- though it does disrupt children's education when it happens.
The "market power" bit has never really worked, though, even in the indy sector. One of the hopes was that good schools would want to expand to meet demand, and in practice they don't. Partly because of the capital costs, partly because small schools are nicer to run and nicer to be at and parents like them.
So the optimal thing schools try to do is full up and enrollment and let that roll over until the kids leave.
Great as the market is, there are situations where it fails. And then you need something to moderate the market failure.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
Most children go to their parents' first choice of schools. You can take your children out of school any time you want and enroll them in another school if it has space. And most English secondary schools are already Academies and therefore not run by the local authority. Sure, get rid of the DofE and OFSTED but then who would oversee the money spent on Academies, and how would parents have any idea which schools are good? Just out of interest, do you have much experience of the state school system?
The US is now keen to disincentivize electric vehicles:
If this was genuinely about a concern about vehicle weight, they could actually, you know, charge according to vehicle weight.
They really have gone absolutely radio rental. This would be like opposing the automobile, or the transistor. Electric vechicles, and renewable energy, and grid storage, are the future. You aren't going to win by opposing them, you will simply accelerate the accendancy of China, which is nailed on now IMHO.
Danielle R. Sassoon, Manhattan’s acting U.S. attorney, resigned on Thursday rather than obey a Justice Department order that she drop a corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, that she had championed, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Holy Shit. They're burning through people pretty fast now. After Sassoon refused/resigned, the next two people - heads of Public Integrity Section (DC) and the Criminal Division also refused/resigned. This all JUST happened. And these are all 'actings', so they're people the Trump crew chose.
Nixon looks good in retrospect...
She wrote to the AG, alleging Adams offered a deal, minuted by a colleague.
To misquote Stringer Bell, "is you takin notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy"
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Where does this strange fantasy come that no-one in the public sector is interested in making savings? Budgets are tight. Public sector bodies are constantly looking to see how they can cut costs. Politicians are always demanding cuts where possible.
The ONS literally said that productivity is down 8.4% overall and 18.4% in the NHS vs pre-covid. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want, it's not me saying this, it's the government's own bloody statistics body. I guarantee you that they don't look to cut costs the same way the private sector does. Early in my career my then employer cut 15% of jobs globally, resulting in 45k people being let go including about 50 people in my location, I survived by virtue of being cheap to employ. Since then that company has gone from a valuation of ~$12bn to around $140bn and many people place the start of the turnaround on that first big round of job cuts. In which world will the government announce 15% job losses across the state?
Do you have a link to the ONS report? How do they measure the output of a public sector employee?
Figure 8 shoes that NHS productivity was growing quite a bit in the run up to the pandemic, up nearly 25% compared with 1997. Given overall productivity growth has been rubbish, you might actually find the NHS is ... 👀
Not really, you are talking about a 25% increase in productivity over 22 years, not much more than 1% a year and all of which was lost as a result of Covid. Our current productivity seems to be at exactly the same level as it was in 1997, surely a truly appalling result given the advances in technology in that time.
I am extremely sceptical of a lot of these statistics.
So: the NHS accounted for 10.4% of GDP in Fiscal 2024, against 10.0% in 2019. That trend - rising healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP - has happened everywhere in the world, and reflects a whole bunch of things.
When we say that productivity has fallen by 18% relative to pre-Covid, what are we saying? Are people recieving 18% less healthcare (and how do we bake in the effects of an ageing population)?
And the ONS report is vague, and does a very poor job of explaining how it gets its conclusions.
I share some of your suspicions but I welcome the fact that the ONS is turning their mind to this. Hopefully the quality of the data will improve over time.
So, you're saying you hope the productivity of the ONS staff improves?
How do you measure their productivity? What is this report worth?
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
You are comparing nominal and actual. So, a 10% wage increase is entirely justified if we have 10% inflation simply to retain the real value of the wage. It does not mean that there needs to be a cut in headcount as well. Of course management should always be looking to reduce headcount where possible regardless of what people are being paid.
I am highly sympathetic to some of your points. I fear WFH, combined with an anxiety about everyone's mental health and work life balance simply means that it is a lot easier not to work as hard as you do in an office where your output is readily assessable and comparable.
But you are sounding like Elon Musk. A more measured and focused way to address these problems is needed.
Somewhat contradictory - my productivity went way up when I started WFH. Then $work brought in 'professional' management from the private sector. At which point my productivity plummeted due to endless meetings and 'process' being added to every facet of the work day so that it could all be 'measured' in some way.
I think there are just bad WFH experiences and also good ones, bad and good management, etc. I'm not sure everyone being in an office makes that much difference. Slackers gonna slack.
Just to tie it round to the AI/LLM chat, I was amused to see a demo of the Claude 'computer use' agent which got bored with the task it had been given and ended up just browsing photo's of Yosemite Park on google images.
Like the office worker it dreams of replacing.
I was working from home for various clients for the best part of 8 years before the pandemic. They all wanted me in their offices and when I said they should look elsewhere they all backed down and accepted I should work from home for them with occasional visits. The trick is to be absolutely scrupulous with your hours and show them that they get a better service. Given the work was often 24/7 on call it was the only practical way to work things. I always used to warn clients (and was proved right) that I would be less productive on those weeks when I was in the office because of the unavoidable distractions from the job at hand - not least the pointless meetings they would continually organise.
If you are disciplined and genuinely wanting to get the work done then working from home can very much be the better option.
Wouldn't work for me, and if employers want to be firm on it then they are welcome to try it, but I think the point is well made that it absolutely can work well so being 100% against is unreasonably inflexible.
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
I do wonder if Trump is going to pull a Liberal victory out of the hat in Canada.
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
He's a world class troll, no question, and he's presumably helping the Liberals recover their position for upcoming Candadian elections, but what is his end goal here? What is the USA likely to achieve?
These lines in Sassoon's letter to the U.S. Attorney General could provide a solid basis for NY Governor Kathy Hochul to remove Mayor Adams from office.
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
“Great men”
I did not have King Charles' biggest challenge in his time as King being dealing with the american invasion of canada on my bingo card.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Where does this strange fantasy come that no-one in the public sector is interested in making savings? Budgets are tight. Public sector bodies are constantly looking to see how they can cut costs. Politicians are always demanding cuts where possible.
The ONS literally said that productivity is down 8.4% overall and 18.4% in the NHS vs pre-covid. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want, it's not me saying this, it's the government's own bloody statistics body. I guarantee you that they don't look to cut costs the same way the private sector does. Early in my career my then employer cut 15% of jobs globally, resulting in 45k people being let go including about 50 people in my location, I survived by virtue of being cheap to employ. Since then that company has gone from a valuation of ~$12bn to around $140bn and many people place the start of the turnaround on that first big round of job cuts. In which world will the government announce 15% job losses across the state?
Do you have a link to the ONS report? How do they measure the output of a public sector employee?
Figure 8 shoes that NHS productivity was growing quite a bit in the run up to the pandemic, up nearly 25% compared with 1997. Given overall productivity growth has been rubbish, you might actually find the NHS is ... 👀
Not really, you are talking about a 25% increase in productivity over 22 years, not much more than 1% a year and all of which was lost as a result of Covid. Our current productivity seems to be at exactly the same level as it was in 1997, surely a truly appalling result given the advances in technology in that time.
I am extremely sceptical of a lot of these statistics.
So: the NHS accounted for 10.4% of GDP in Fiscal 2024, against 10.0% in 2019. That trend - rising healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP - has happened everywhere in the world, and reflects a whole bunch of things.
When we say that productivity has fallen by 18% relative to pre-Covid, what are we saying? Are people recieving 18% less healthcare (and how do we bake in the effects of an ageing population)?
And the ONS report is vague, and does a very poor job of explaining how it gets its conclusions.
Given the huge increase in waiting lists maybe the answer is that the ONS have it right and the NHS is just delivering less healthcare per dollar spent?
Waitlists grew massively during Covid: have they grown since? Because surely it is the change in the size of the waitlist that matters.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
You are comparing nominal and actual. So, a 10% wage increase is entirely justified if we have 10% inflation simply to retain the real value of the wage. It does not mean that there needs to be a cut in headcount as well. Of course management should always be looking to reduce headcount where possible regardless of what people are being paid.
I am highly sympathetic to some of your points. I fear WFH, combined with an anxiety about everyone's mental health and work life balance simply means that it is a lot easier not to work as hard as you do in an office where your output is readily assessable and comparable.
But you are sounding like Elon Musk. A more measured and focused way to address these problems is needed.
You can measure whether someone is meeting their objectives and output every appraisal whether they are wfh or in the office or a bit of both
It wasn't a CV that she submitted for any of her current roles though was it?
It was just about bio on a Social Media networking site.
It's not as if banking experience has ever been a requirement to be CoE. Many great Chancellors had no prior experience of finance, other than their own domestic ones.
Imagine some separate person - very much not the current chancellor - who fiddled their expenses while working at a major bank, got rumbled and formally investigated, then accepted a compromise agreement to leave that job to avoid both them and their employer the grief of formal dismissal proceedings, then later went into politics and decided to muddy the water in their online CV by extending back the apparent duration of their next appointment, to cover the period when they were actually finishing up with that major bank.
How would the traces that person had left be different from those left by the current chancellor, due to her entirely innocent administrative mistakes?
That separate person - very much not the chancellor - we surely wouldn’t want as chancellor, since someone who got caught fiddling their expenses and then has tried amateurishly to subsequently cover their tracks isn’t someone we would want in charge of our national finances? We’d be much better with someone who just makes innocent administrative mistakes, like our Ms Reeves.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
There's nothing inherently stopping parents moving their children whenever they like- though it does disrupt children's education when it happens.
The "market power" bit has never really worked, though, even in the indy sector. One of the hopes was that good schools would want to expand to meet demand, and in practice they don't. Partly because of the capital costs, partly because small schools are nicer to run and nicer to be at and parents like them.
So the optimal thing schools try to do is full up and enrollment and let that roll over until the kids leave.
Great as the market is, there are situations where it fails. And then you need something to moderate the market failure.
More fundamentally, the notion that the answer to "My local school isn't very good, and there are either no better ones nearby or they're all full" is "Build your own then" is astonishing, and not in a good way. Notwithstanding the fact that it would take years, and therefore be of no use to their own child by the time it was finished, how many parents have the time, necessary knowhow and money to construct and staff a school? It's only marginally less unrealistic than telling people with high energy bills to club together and commission a small modular nuclear reactor at the bottom of the road.
These lines in Sassoon's letter to the U.S. Attorney General could provide a solid basis for NY Governor Kathy Hochul to remove Mayor Adams from office.
[Adams' counsel] admonished a member of my teak who took notes during that meeing and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting's conclusion.
Trump also famously disliked his White House lawyers taking notes, saying he had had great lawyers who never took notes, with one apparently replying that real lawyers take notes.
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
He's a world class troll, no question, and he's presumably helping the Liberals recover their position for upcoming Candadian elections, but what is his end goal here? What is the USA likely to achieve?
He's trolling the libs.
(And driving Canada into the arms of China. Because what does Canada have? Lots of mineral wealth. And who wants mineral wealth? China.)
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
He's a world class troll, no question, and he's presumably helping the Liberals recover their position for upcoming Candadian elections, but what is his end goal here? What is the USA likely to achieve?
How does the wall keep us free? The wall keeps out the enemy And we build the wall to keep us free That's why we build the wall We build the wall to keep us free
That only works if there is an imaginable enemy on the other side of the wall.
Either that, or there is no endgame in mind- just the random thoughts of an angry and increasingly senile old man.
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
I do wonder if Trump is going to pull a Liberal victory out of the hat in Canada.
Turns out he was the best thing that could happen to them if they can manage it, maybe other flailing parties looking for a refresh can get Trump to threaten annexation.
It was officially renewed - contracts signed etc - before Christmas
Great news. Not least because it will piss off all the racist incels with their moans about black elves and 'efnic' hobbits.
Eh, it really lost me with the second series. I can totally get on board with going against canon and so on, but it just wasn't gripping me.
The race of elves stuff is nothing to do with the original stories.
Bolder and braver would have been to have racial groups within the elves - with discussion of how this influenced the Kinslaying, say.
Instead of random elves being black and no one noticing.
The real problem is that the story was written by a committee. Who have no clue how to write an intelligent plot. Galadriel is an x thousand year old princess, who personally knows the angels and archangels, has met The Devil and is generally isn’t a teenager. With poor emotion control.
It was officially renewed - contracts signed etc - before Christmas
Great news. Not least because it will piss off all the racist incels with their moans about black elves and 'efnic' hobbits.
Eh, it really lost me with the second series. I can totally get on board with going against canon and so on, but it just wasn't gripping me.
The race of elves stuff is nothing to do with the original stories.
Bolder and braver would have been to have racial groups within the elves - with discussion of how this influenced the Kinslaying, say.
Instead of random elves being black and no one noticing.
The real problem is that the story was written by a committee. Who have no clue how to write an intelligent plot. Galadriel is an x thousand year old princess, who personally knows the angels and archangels, has met The Devil and is generally isn’t a teenager. With poor emotion control.
Poor emotion control feels like it is de rigueur thesedays in many stories. I guess it is seen as more dramatic, but when it is the norm oftentimes it makes adult characters sound like children.
I'm not calling for everyone to have stiff upper lips all the time, but a little more subtle use of crying and screaming in certain shows would be nice.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
There's nothing inherently stopping parents moving their children whenever they like- though it does disrupt children's education when it happens.
The "market power" bit has never really worked, though, even in the indy sector. One of the hopes was that good schools would want to expand to meet demand, and in practice they don't. Partly because of the capital costs, partly because small schools are nicer to run and nicer to be at and parents like them.
So the optimal thing schools try to do is full up and enrollment and let that roll over until the kids leave.
Great as the market is, there are situations where it fails. And then you need something to moderate the market failure.
More fundamentally, the notion that the answer to "My local school isn't very good, and there are either no better ones nearby or they're all full" is "Build your own then" is astonishing, and not in a good way. Notwithstanding the fact that it would take years, and therefore be of no use to their own child by the time it was finished, how many parents have the time, necessary knowhow and money to construct and staff a school? It's only marginally less unrealistic than telling people with high energy bills to club together and commission a small modular nuclear reactor at the bottom of the road.
The very early days of the Govian Free School project had 'parental groups putting on the show right here' as the vision. And a few parents rose to the challenge. That Toby Young was one of them probably tells you what you need to know about the scalability of the model.
(Heck, we don't really have enough people able and willing to run the schools we currently have.)
These lines in Sassoon's letter to the U.S. Attorney General could provide a solid basis for NY Governor Kathy Hochul to remove Mayor Adams from office.
[Adams' counsel] admonished a member of my teak who took notes during that meeing and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting's conclusion.
Trump also famously disliked his White House lawyers taking notes, saying he had had great lawyers who never took notes, with one apparently replying that real lawyers take notes.
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
I do wonder if Trump is going to pull a Liberal victory out of the hat in Canada.
The new Leger poll has it Conservatives 40% Liberals 31% and NDP 14% BUT if Carney becomes Liberal Leader that changes to Conservatives 37% Liberals 37% and NDP 12%
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
I do wonder if Trump is going to pull a Liberal victory out of the hat in Canada.
The new Leger poll has it Conservatives 40% Liberals 27% and NDP 15% BUT if Carney becomes Liberal Leader that changes to Cons 37% Liberals 37% and NDP 12%
I find it hard to credit any new leader would be so well regarded as to change the fundamentals so much, but at least some people are claiming to pollsters that is indeed the case.
Is there anyone else of note in the running for leader?
These lines in Sassoon's letter to the U.S. Attorney General could provide a solid basis for NY Governor Kathy Hochul to remove Mayor Adams from office.
[Adams' counsel] admonished a member of my teak who took notes during that meeing and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting's conclusion.
Trump also famously disliked his White House lawyers taking notes, saying he had had great lawyers who never took notes, with one apparently replying that real lawyers take notes.
More precisely, honest lawyers take notes.
Ah, so no lawyers take notes then?
(Just kidding, I love lawyers, as my lawyer advised me to make clear.)
i news reporting that there is "disbelief" in europe over Trump's ukraine and nato moves.
Have these people no idea? What did they think was happening as he was elected/??
Yes, it did seem like the wrong word to use there. Outrage, horror, worry, joy (if you are Orban) there's any number of options to pick from which are more credible than disbelief.
i news reporting that there is "disbelief" in europe over Trump's ukraine and nato moves.
Have these people no idea? What did they think was happening as he was elected/??
It drives me nuts that people who ought to know better are surprised, and the media is still sanewashing Trump.
When Starmer was elected I said that a Trump re-election was the biggest worry, and I hoped that the new government was making preparations. God help us if they haven't, as I can think of all kinds of ways things get very tricky, very fast.
I'm guessing this would not be the game to watch to get into Rugby League for the first time?
Leigh beat reigning champions Wigan in golden-point extra-time of the opening game of the 2025 Super League season - after the two sides played out the first 0-0 draw in the competition's 29-year history. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/articles/c2k5w971j35o
The Trail of Tears was the forced displacement of about 60,000 people of the "Five Civilized Tribes" between 1830 and 1850, and the additional thousands of Native Americans and their enslaved African Americans[3] within that were ethnically cleansed by the United States government.[4]
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
I do wonder if Trump is going to pull a Liberal victory out of the hat in Canada.
The new Leger poll has it Conservatives 40% Liberals 27% and NDP 15% BUT if Carney becomes Liberal Leader that changes to Cons 37% Liberals 37% and NDP 12%
I find it hard to credit any new leader would be so well regarded as to change the fundamentals so much, but at least some people are claiming to pollsters that is indeed the case.
Is there anyone else of note in the running for leader?
Freeland.
It worked for Boris in 2019 and Major 1990 and Macron instead of Hollande in France in 2017 and a bit for Harris last year and Bob Hawke in Australia in 1983 and Morrison in 2019.
A 3% swing from Cons to Libs and a bit from the NDP is not really that unbelievable either
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
There's nothing inherently stopping parents moving their children whenever they like- though it does disrupt children's education when it happens.
The "market power" bit has never really worked, though, even in the indy sector. One of the hopes was that good schools would want to expand to meet demand, and in practice they don't. Partly because of the capital costs, partly because small schools are nicer to run and nicer to be at and parents like them.
So the optimal thing schools try to do is full up and enrollment and let that roll over until the kids leave.
Great as the market is, there are situations where it fails. And then you need something to moderate the market failure.
More fundamentally, the notion that the answer to "My local school isn't very good, and there are either no better ones nearby or they're all full" is "Build your own then" is astonishing, and not in a good way. Notwithstanding the fact that it would take years, and therefore be of no use to their own child by the time it was finished, how many parents have the time, necessary knowhow and money to construct and staff a school? It's only marginally less unrealistic than telling people with high energy bills to club together and commission a small modular nuclear reactor at the bottom of the road.
The very early days of the Govian Free School project had 'parental groups putting on the show right here' as the vision. And a few parents rose to the challenge. That Toby Young was one of them probably tells you what you need to know about the scalability of the model.
(Heck, we don't really have enough people able and willing to run the schools we currently have.)
Worth noting that the schools setup by Toby Young (partly) have become roaring successes.
Among other things the secondary, in particular, got a number of people who would otherwise have gone private to go with the state system. And at the same time, the school became a bit of a refuge for parents wanting to keep their children out of gangs. So lots of that social mixing that some here wish for.
It was officially renewed - contracts signed etc - before Christmas
Great news. Not least because it will piss off all the racist incels with their moans about black elves and 'efnic' hobbits.
Eh, it really lost me with the second series. I can totally get on board with going against canon and so on, but it just wasn't gripping me.
The race of elves stuff is nothing to do with the original stories.
Bolder and braver would have been to have racial groups within the elves - with discussion of how this influenced the Kinslaying, say.
Instead of random elves being black and no one noticing.
The real problem is that the story was written by a committee. Who have no clue how to write an intelligent plot. Galadriel is an x thousand year old princess, who personally knows the angels and archangels, has met The Devil and is generally isn’t a teenager. With poor emotion control.
This would be the Galadriel who, as Tolkein wrote her, took part in the Noldur rebellion - the Civil War between the elves - on the side of the rebels and who claimed that her ambition was to rule her own kingdom in Middle Earth.
Personally I think the rendition in RoP is pretty accurate.
Having worked extensively in schools I believe I have the necessary experience to reply to the suggestion I should help set one up. "Do you think I'm fucking mental ?!?!"
You can understand the Loser better if you realize that he is like much Calvin of "Calvin and Hobbes", desperate for attention, and having no real strategies, no real long term plans.
There are lines in that comic strip that sound so much like the Loser that it is spoooky.
(You would have to exclude the Watterson lines, of course, for instance where he talks about the environment.)
It was officially renewed - contracts signed etc - before Christmas
Great news. Not least because it will piss off all the racist incels with their moans about black elves and 'efnic' hobbits.
Eh, it really lost me with the second series. I can totally get on board with going against canon and so on, but it just wasn't gripping me.
The race of elves stuff is nothing to do with the original stories.
Bolder and braver would have been to have racial groups within the elves - with discussion of how this influenced the Kinslaying, say.
Instead of random elves being black and no one noticing.
The real problem is that the story was written by a committee. Who have no clue how to write an intelligent plot. Galadriel is an x thousand year old princess, who personally knows the angels and archangels, has met The Devil and is generally isn’t a teenager. With poor emotion control.
This would be the Galadriel who, as Tolkein wrote her, took part in the Noldur rebellion - the Civil War between the elves - on the side of the rebels and who claimed that her ambition was to rule her own kingdom in Middle Earth.
Personally I think the rendition in RoP is pretty accurate.
Er…. In the actual books she refused to speak to Sauron-in-disguise on sight. Because she bothered to ask which Maiar he was. And when he couldn’t come up with answer, banned him from her lands.
It was officially renewed - contracts signed etc - before Christmas
Great news. Not least because it will piss off all the racist incels with their moans about black elves and 'efnic' hobbits.
Eh, it really lost me with the second series. I can totally get on board with going against canon and so on, but it just wasn't gripping me.
The race of elves stuff is nothing to do with the original stories.
Bolder and braver would have been to have racial groups within the elves - with discussion of how this influenced the Kinslaying, say.
Instead of random elves being black and no one noticing.
The real problem is that the story was written by a committee. Who have no clue how to write an intelligent plot. Galadriel is an x thousand year old princess, who personally knows the angels and archangels, has met The Devil and is generally isn’t a teenager. With poor emotion control.
This would be the Galadriel who, as Tolkein wrote her, took part in the Noldur rebellion - the Civil War between the elves - on the side of the rebels and who claimed that her ambition was to rule her own kingdom in Middle Earth.
Personally I think the rendition in RoP is pretty accurate.
I've maintained before her famous line about potentially being a dark queen etc makes more sense if the version of her backstory where she was a rebel (and thus probably a bit of an arrogant arse) is taken as true (Tolkein did write several different versions), and could be the set up for good character growth.
I just think it's not a well written show. I could forgive any lore issues I do have if it was, as characterisation and plotting are more important to get right.
Reminds me a bit of Westworld in that regard, which I think fooled people in its first season that it was good with great production values, and missing it was a load of old nonsense.
Danielle R. Sassoon, Manhattan’s acting U.S. attorney, resigned on Thursday rather than obey a Justice Department order that she drop a corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, that she had championed, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Holy Shit. They're burning through people pretty fast now. After Sassoon refused/resigned, the next two people - heads of Public Integrity Section (DC) and the Criminal Division also refused/resigned. This all JUST happened. And these are all 'actings', so they're people the Trump crew chose.
I don't quite understand why Trump has gone into bat for Eric Adams in the first place.
It is total banana republic stuff that we have seen from both Biden and Trump over the past couple of months in regards to criminal cases.
That’s simple. The charges against Adams can be resuscitated; he’s effectively an administration pawn now.
I'm guessing this would not be the game to watch to get into Rugby League for the first time?
Leigh beat reigning champions Wigan in golden-point extra-time of the opening game of the 2025 Super League season - after the two sides played out the first 0-0 draw in the competition's 29-year history. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/articles/c2k5w971j35o
I had it on in the background and periodically commented to the wife about how long and still no points…
Reminded me of the one and only baseball game I’ve attended. Bottom of the 7th and it too was still 0-0. Ended 2-0 I think. Rubbish.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
There's nothing inherently stopping parents moving their children whenever they like- though it does disrupt children's education when it happens.
The "market power" bit has never really worked, though, even in the indy sector. One of the hopes was that good schools would want to expand to meet demand, and in practice they don't. Partly because of the capital costs, partly because small schools are nicer to run and nicer to be at and parents like them.
So the optimal thing schools try to do is full up and enrollment and let that roll over until the kids leave.
Great as the market is, there are situations where it fails. And then you need something to moderate the market failure.
More fundamentally, the notion that the answer to "My local school isn't very good, and there are either no better ones nearby or they're all full" is "Build your own then" is astonishing, and not in a good way. Notwithstanding the fact that it would take years, and therefore be of no use to their own child by the time it was finished, how many parents have the time, necessary knowhow and money to construct and staff a school? It's only marginally less unrealistic than telling people with high energy bills to club together and commission a small modular nuclear reactor at the bottom of the road.
The very early days of the Govian Free School project had 'parental groups putting on the show right here' as the vision. And a few parents rose to the challenge. That Toby Young was one of them probably tells you what you need to know about the scalability of the model.
(Heck, we don't really have enough people able and willing to run the schools we currently have.)
Worth noting that the schools setup by Toby Young (partly) have become roaring successes.
Among other things the secondary, in particular, got a number of people who would otherwise have gone private to go with the state system. And at the same time, the school became a bit of a refuge for parents wanting to keep their children out of gangs. So lots of that social mixing that some here wish for.
Yes, it's one of the better things the Tobemeister has done in his life.
But the number of parents with the resource and headspace to make a school happen isn't huge. The model doesn't scale. Because running a school is difficult.
(And as I may have mentioned before- there is almost certainly an existing local school desperate for governors who can read and process an agenda.)
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Where does this strange fantasy come that no-one in the public sector is interested in making savings? Budgets are tight. Public sector bodies are constantly looking to see how they can cut costs. Politicians are always demanding cuts where possible.
The ONS literally said that productivity is down 8.4% overall and 18.4% in the NHS vs pre-covid. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want, it's not me saying this, it's the government's own bloody statistics body. I guarantee you that they don't look to cut costs the same way the private sector does. Early in my career my then employer cut 15% of jobs globally, resulting in 45k people being let go including about 50 people in my location, I survived by virtue of being cheap to employ. Since then that company has gone from a valuation of ~$12bn to around $140bn and many people place the start of the turnaround on that first big round of job cuts. In which world will the government announce 15% job losses across the state?
Do you have a link to the ONS report? How do they measure the output of a public sector employee?
Figure 8 shoes that NHS productivity was growing quite a bit in the run up to the pandemic, up nearly 25% compared with 1997. Given overall productivity growth has been rubbish, you might actually find the NHS is ... 👀
Not really, you are talking about a 25% increase in productivity over 22 years, not much more than 1% a year and all of which was lost as a result of Covid. Our current productivity seems to be at exactly the same level as it was in 1997, surely a truly appalling result given the advances in technology in that time.
It was officially renewed - contracts signed etc - before Christmas
Great news. Not least because it will piss off all the racist incels with their moans about black elves and 'efnic' hobbits.
Eh, it really lost me with the second series. I can totally get on board with going against canon and so on, but it just wasn't gripping me.
The race of elves stuff is nothing to do with the original stories.
Bolder and braver would have been to have racial groups within the elves - with discussion of how this influenced the Kinslaying, say.
Instead of random elves being black and no one noticing.
The real problem is that the story was written by a committee. Who have no clue how to write an intelligent plot. Galadriel is an x thousand year old princess, who personally knows the angels and archangels, has met The Devil and is generally isn’t a teenager. With poor emotion control.
This would be the Galadriel who, as Tolkein wrote her, took part in the Noldur rebellion - the Civil War between the elves - on the side of the rebels and who claimed that her ambition was to rule her own kingdom in Middle Earth.
Personally I think the rendition in RoP is pretty accurate.
I've maintained before her famous line about potentially being a dark queen etc makes more sense if the version of her backstory where she was a rebel (and thus probably a bit of an arrogant arse) is taken as true (Tolkein did write several different versions), and could be the set up for good character growth.
I just think it's not a well written show. I could forgive any lore issues I do have if it was, as characterisation and plotting are more important to get right.
Reminds me a bit of Westworld in that regard, which I think fooled people in its first season that it was good with great production values, and missing it was a load of old nonsense.
First series of Westworld had a superb twist for the viewer - multiple timelines that presented as a single timeline. Great fun. But then after they felt a need to have another great idea. And once you leave the Park you have to build a whole world, and frankly the workd they built didn’t work. Sometimes having the guts to stop after the story is told is a virtue.
The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment. … Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..
As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.
If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.
"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.
Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."
Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.
We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.
Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?
Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.
This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.
Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?
The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.
Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.
Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.
Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?
We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.
Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.
Max I kept drafting a reply to say I basically agree with your position (but didn't send it quickly enough to keep up with the discussion) but in this response you just reveal that you have very little idea about how to drive public sector productivity.
'Output increases' are complex in the public sector. What do output increases look like in education? Bigger classes so you get more GCSEs per teacher?
'Automatic pay rises?' look at the first graph on this IFS report on relative pay. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/what-has-happened-teacher-pay-england. If you stop pay rises all you get is experienced (read: more productive) professionals leaving the profession.
Coupling pay rises with a reduction in head count? We're getting that anyway with the recruitment crisis.
There are many productivity issues that do need addressing, in education as well as elsewhere as @foxy notes.
But to try to apply your (clearly extensive) experience of the private sector without adequate knowledge of the particular challenges of the public sector is just naive.
Again, we've been playing by your (well maybe not yours but the normal) rules until now and things keep getting worse. Maybe it's time to adopt what the private sector does and see what happens. Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why should anyone believe that we're going to magically get a different result by doing the same thing again?
It's time for drastic action which includes mandatory headcount losses across all departments including the sainted NHS and and drop in output should be punishable by wage freezes and further job cuts for senior and top managers. These people all say they could "do better in the private sector" well I say it's time to call that bluff. Put these people on the spot and if they can't do it then find people who can.
Alright, to stop being a naysayer and to focus on the good bits of what I think you're driving at:
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
I'd be up for that, we do need a paradigm shift (hopefully that doesn't sound too MBA) in how services are delivered and a much bigger focus on outcomes rather than processes. One of the core values of a company I consulted for last year was "be customer obsessed" or something along those lines and that's really just a way of saying "be outcome focussed" translating it to the public sector. The state cares more about its employees than it does about the customer, that's what needs to change.
Agreed on the lack of 'customer' focus in the public sector atm, and to defend other bits of what you're saying, I suspect unions would throw their toys out the pram at such a radical change, so they may need to be fought on something like this.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
I also think we could do away with local authority control over schools and most of the DfE, most of OFSTED and just give parents much more control over where they send their kids, even giving them the ability to take them out at the end of the year and putting them in another school. Your way would actually allow for parent power/market power to put bad schools out of business and allow for that funding to be better spent.
There's nothing inherently stopping parents moving their children whenever they like- though it does disrupt children's education when it happens.
The "market power" bit has never really worked, though, even in the indy sector. One of the hopes was that good schools would want to expand to meet demand, and in practice they don't. Partly because of the capital costs, partly because small schools are nicer to run and nicer to be at and parents like them.
So the optimal thing schools try to do is full up and enrollment and let that roll over until the kids leave.
Great as the market is, there are situations where it fails. And then you need something to moderate the market failure.
More fundamentally, the notion that the answer to "My local school isn't very good, and there are either no better ones nearby or they're all full" is "Build your own then" is astonishing, and not in a good way. Notwithstanding the fact that it would take years, and therefore be of no use to their own child by the time it was finished, how many parents have the time, necessary knowhow and money to construct and staff a school? It's only marginally less unrealistic than telling people with high energy bills to club together and commission a small modular nuclear reactor at the bottom of the road.
The very early days of the Govian Free School project had 'parental groups putting on the show right here' as the vision. And a few parents rose to the challenge. That Toby Young was one of them probably tells you what you need to know about the scalability of the model.
(Heck, we don't really have enough people able and willing to run the schools we currently have.)
Worth noting that the schools setup by Toby Young (partly) have become roaring successes.
Among other things the secondary, in particular, got a number of people who would otherwise have gone private to go with the state system. And at the same time, the school became a bit of a refuge for parents wanting to keep their children out of gangs. So lots of that social mixing that some here wish for.
Yes, it's one of the better things the Tobemeister has done in his life.
But the number of parents with the resource and headspace to make a school happen isn't huge. The model doesn't scale. Because running a school is difficult.
(And as I may have mentioned before- there is almost certainly an existing local school desperate for governors who can read and process an agenda.)
What happened in the US is the people who built a successful model then rolled it out on a much larger scale. KIPPs is the inspiration for the Free school idea and then have ~300 schools.
'A new bill lifting the ban on Catholics becoming the King's representative at the Church of Scotland's annual assembly has been introduced at the House of Commons.'
Supposedly nobopdy noticed that the law was still in place (from C19) until someone remembered almost too late. Dame Elish Angioloni is the new rep. She's from a Glasgow family of Irish RC background.
Comments
I insisted on payment before I released the report in the future.
@sturdyAlex
There's been flashier clips of the current insanity, but this quietly demonstrates the current disintegration of US standards like no other.
-Did Musk meet Modi as CEO or gov't?
-You talking about me?
-Musk.
-Dunno. Business probly.
-Did Modi know which?
-Dunno. I'll ask him.
😶
https://x.com/sturdyAlex/status/1890145455771972051
I think there are just bad WFH experiences and also good ones, bad and good management, etc. I'm not sure everyone being in an office makes that much difference. Slackers gonna slack.
Just to tie it round to the AI/LLM chat, I was amused to see a demo of the Claude 'computer use' agent which got bored with the task it had been given and ended up just browsing photo's of Yosemite Park on google images.
Like the office worker it dreams of replacing.
If this was genuinely about a concern about vehicle weight, they could actually, you know, charge according to vehicle weight.
We could achieve dramatic productivity improvements in education by changing the way schools operate.
Much more use of technology, much greater data harvesting of student performance fed into AI to generate personalised learning tasks for each student. Students have much more choice over which tasks they tackle (but with a minimum time requirement spent on core subjects).
Students routinely work in classrooms with 100 kids in, supervised by specialists in behaviour management not subject specialists.Teachers spend their time monitoring student performance on assigned tasks (again with AI support) and using that info to plan intervention sessions that move kids on when they're stuck. These are more like university tutorials. Students get a minimum entitlement to such tutorials to maintain motivation and human contact.
I'd estimate you could cut 20% off the education budget, employ fewer teachers, but get better outputs (better educated, happier, more motivated kids).
Have you ever been involved with a hospital discharge for someone who almost certainly needs social care?
Maybe I have had a bad couple of experiences in my family but the nhs bureaucracy in these cases is off the fucking scale.
Meetings involving half a dozen, sometimes more, health professionals - OT, social services, physiotherapy, mental health, dietician*, 'consultant's-representative-on-earth', notes from the GP and... drum roll... a Discharge Co-ordinator Officer who is gamely trying to keep track of all these people etc.
I have literally had a family member case where the consultant threatened to use the little know 'discharge with risk' clause to cut through the absolute crap she was faced with in order to get her hands on bed for someone who was really needing medical help.
Everyone in the room is ticking boxes on ipads or sheets of paper and uming and arghing and saying things like 'you know, but what if...' and 'have we considered...'
* I am not joking here.
I'm sending invoices to the guy in the finance office they told me to send them to. This guy - after ignoring me for weeks - now says I should be sending invoices to this other guy. Who I know sits a few desks away and works in the same office in the same team.
Their customer now threatening legal action for non-payment (as you suggest I do). Has the first guy passed the invoices onto his colleague a few desks away? Has he fu
Same with the cuts to training, buildings and capital. Eventually it makes an impact.
I don't buy the 'treat the employees worse and you'll get better results' aspect, but I do think we should be much braver in calling out poor performance within the public sector and being able to sack eg crap teachers.
So yes, I don't think the legal firm had been paid either, but that is their choice not mine.
No payment, no report. My terms are simple now.
And never do a Legal aid case. Ever.
That's the trouble with the state we are in. The best solutions to our problems involve a time machine and taking less short-sighted decisions a few decades ago.
So: the NHS accounted for 10.4% of GDP in Fiscal 2024, against 10.0% in 2019. That trend - rising healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP - has happened everywhere in the world, and reflects a whole bunch of things.
When we say that productivity has fallen by 18% relative to pre-Covid, what are we saying? Are people recieving 18% less healthcare (and how do we bake in the effects of an ageing population)?
And the ONS report is vague, and does a very poor job of explaining how it gets its conclusions.
A World leader met with Elon Musk, and Trump doesn't know if it was an official US Government meeting or not
He's away with the fairies
NHS productivity growth: 14.1% (1)
Overall productivity growth: 3.9% (2)
NHS real wage growth: -6.7% (3)
Private sector real wage growth: -0.4% (4)
👀👀👀👀👀
1) Max's link
2) https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/articles/ukproductivityintroduction/julytoseptember2024andapriltojune2024
3) https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-staff-earnings-estimates
4) https://www.ons.gov.uk/surveys/informationforbusinesses/businesssurveys/annualsurveyofhoursandearningsashe
If you are disciplined and genuinely wanting to get the work done then working from home can very much be the better option.
Sweeping job cuts and “efficiency savings” do not always work in the private sector. You sound like an overpaid and overvalued management consultant.
I am reminded of Tom Wolfe's dictum about no fiction is madder than getting out there and seeing real america.
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
Had a very good meeting with @elonmusk in Washington DC
NHS productivity growth: -5.3%
Overall productivity growth: 6.2%
NHS real wage growth: -4.5%
Private sector real wage growth: 0.6%
So the NHS got trashed by COVID. Who knew?
And not that it's anything to do with you, but such legal chiselling does raise questions about the quality of justice if one is poor (or if one is not poor but not rich and has to spend half the house on defence against an unfair prosecution). If Lucy Letby was on legal aid, for instance, the chorus of "why didn't her defence bring up this statistical issue and that issue at the trial" on PB takes on a rather different meaning, given that lawyers are not normally specialist medical statisticians.
The "market power" bit has never really worked, though, even in the indy sector. One of the hopes was that good schools would want to expand to meet demand, and in practice they don't. Partly because of the capital costs, partly because small schools are nicer to run and nicer to be at and parents like them.
So the optimal thing schools try to do is full up and enrollment and let that roll over until the kids leave.
Great as the market is, there are situations where it fails. And then you need something to moderate the market failure.
Just out of interest, do you have much experience of the state school system?
To misquote Stringer Bell, "is you takin notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy"
Trump on Canada: "I spoke to Governor Trudeau ... they don't have military protection, and you take a look at what's going on out there ... people are in danger ... they need our protection."
How do you measure their productivity? What is this report worth?
These lines in Sassoon's letter to the U.S. Attorney General could provide a solid basis for NY Governor Kathy Hochul to remove Mayor Adams from office.
https://bsky.app/profile/rgoodlaw.bsky.social/post/3li3o3d74zs2o
Strange times.
How would the traces that person had left be different from those left by the current chancellor, due to her entirely innocent administrative mistakes?
That separate person - very much not the chancellor - we surely wouldn’t want as chancellor, since someone who got caught fiddling their expenses and then has tried amateurishly to subsequently cover their tracks isn’t someone we would want in charge of our national finances? We’d be much better with someone who just makes innocent administrative mistakes, like our Ms Reeves.
Trump also famously disliked his White House lawyers taking notes, saying he had had great lawyers who never took notes, with one apparently replying that real lawyers take notes.
(And driving Canada into the arms of China. Because what does Canada have? Lots of mineral wealth. And who wants mineral wealth? China.)
The wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That's why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
That only works if there is an imaginable enemy on the other side of the wall.
Either that, or there is no endgame in mind- just the random thoughts of an angry and increasingly senile old man.
Not enough hammer wielders
The race of elves stuff is nothing to do with the original stories.
Bolder and braver would have been to have racial groups within the elves - with discussion of how this influenced the Kinslaying, say.
Instead of random elves being black and no one noticing.
The real problem is that the story was written by a committee. Who have no clue how to write an intelligent plot. Galadriel is an x thousand year old princess, who personally knows the angels and archangels, has met The Devil and is generally isn’t a teenager. With poor emotion control.
I'm not calling for everyone to have stiff upper lips all the time, but a little more subtle use of crying and screaming in certain shows would be nice.
(Heck, we don't really have enough people able and willing to run the schools we currently have.)
https://leger360.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Leger-x-Canadian-Press-Federal-Politics_VF.pdf
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/climate/ivanpah-desert-solar-closing/index.html
Is there anyone else of note in the running for leader?
i news reporting that there is "disbelief" in europe over Trump's ukraine and nato moves.
Have these people no idea? What did they think was happening as he was elected/??
(Just kidding, I love lawyers, as my lawyer advised me to make clear.)
When Starmer was elected I said that a Trump re-election was the biggest worry, and I hoped that the new government was making preparations. God help us if they haven't, as I can think of all kinds of ways things get very tricky, very fast.
Leigh beat reigning champions Wigan in golden-point extra-time of the opening game of the 2025 Super League season - after the two sides played out the first 0-0 draw in the competition's 29-year history.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/articles/c2k5w971j35o
It worked for Boris in 2019 and Major 1990 and Macron instead of Hollande in France in 2017 and a bit for Harris last year and Bob Hawke in Australia in 1983 and Morrison in 2019.
A 3% swing from Cons to Libs and a bit from the NDP is not really that unbelievable either
Among other things the secondary, in particular, got a number of people who would otherwise have gone private to go with the state system. And at the same time, the school became a bit of a refuge for parents wanting to keep their children out of gangs. So lots of that social mixing that some here wish for.
Personally I think the rendition in RoP is pretty accurate.
"Do you think I'm fucking mental ?!?!"
There are lines in that comic strip that sound so much like the Loser that it is spoooky.
(You would have to exclude the Watterson lines, of course, for instance where he talks about the environment.)
I just think it's not a well written show. I could forgive any lore issues I do have if it was, as characterisation and plotting are more important to get right.
Reminds me a bit of Westworld in that regard, which I think fooled people in its first season that it was good with great production values, and missing it was a load of old nonsense.
That’s simple.
The charges against Adams can be resuscitated; he’s effectively an administration pawn now.
Reminded me of the one and only baseball game I’ve attended. Bottom of the 7th and it too was still 0-0. Ended 2-0 I think. Rubbish.
You are now irrelevant.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/establishing-the-presidents-make-america-healthy-again-commission/
But the number of parents with the resource and headspace to make a school happen isn't huge. The model doesn't scale. Because running a school is difficult.
(And as I may have mentioned before- there is almost certainly an existing local school desperate for governors who can read and process an agenda.)
(Both Democratic officials have shown their gratitude by backing the Loser.)
Surely the answer to the growth problem is to have another lockdown....
Sometimes having the guts to stop after the story is told is a virtue.
'A new bill lifting the ban on Catholics becoming the King's representative at the Church of Scotland's annual assembly has been introduced at the House of Commons.'
Supposedly nobopdy noticed that the law was still in place (from C19) until someone remembered almost too late. Dame Elish Angioloni is the new rep. She's from a Glasgow family of Irish RC background.