Small government, freedom and free markets

Steve Barclay recently made the headlines for cutting one in six posts in the Department of Health.  His colleagues might do well to follow his example. There are almost half a million more people working in the public sector today than in 2019. The civil service alone has seen a 15% increase in numbers over the same period.

Despite this, the deeply held media and public perception is that “Tory cuts” have left public services struggling with overworked staff, as their budgets are slashed. Yet the truth is that governemtn is spending £200 billion a year more than before the pandemic and it is virtually impossible to find an arm of government which had not seen a significant increase in staff over the past thirteen years, with particularly sharp rises since 2019. The Home Office had 34,180 full time equivalent staff in 2019 and now has 40,590. The Department of Work and Pensions had 68,740 and now has 75,930.

There is much complaint about the creaking criminal justice system but the crown prosecution service now has almost 1500 more employees than it did three years ago. Staffing in the prison and probation service has increased by a quarter in the same period. The National Crime Agency has taken on 1000 more people the Food Standards Agency has seen a 10% increase and the police have taken on 20,000 new recruits.

HMRC which is no longer capable of answering its phones has 5000 more staff than it did in 2019. Ofgem which did such a poor job of managing the impact of the increase in gas prices has seen a 50% increase in staff.

The NHS where the narrative remains that it is desperately short of staff is now employing 1.7 million people, an increase of 200,000 since 2019. Publi11 % more nurses and 10% more hospital consultants than in 2019 and the number of clinical staff is increasing by 3% a year.

Yet this is not reducing waiting lists or improving service. As the National Audit Office has found reported “The NHS now has a problem with reduced productivity.” They cited figures that showed the NHS was 16% less productive in 2021 than it was in 2019, and that this problem had continued into 2022-23. The Institute for Fiscal Studies summed up the position, saying: “We’ve poured lots more resources particularly into the health service, but the outputs that we’re getting from our public services haven’t increased in the same way.”

In education the workforce continue to grow. There are just short of a million people working in schools now, 100,000 more than ten years ago. The overall number of full-time equivalent teachers working in maintained schools increased by 15,000 since 2019 and while pupil numbers have increased too, overall pupil teacher ratios have stayed about the same. 

There will be an argument that some of the reason for the increases in staffing is that these bodies are doing more and certainly many of the extra people in schools are taking on roles parents used to do. Yet in many government departments there is a question then is whether all this extra activity is necessary. Does the Department of Health really need to provide adult cycle training classes? Are the business department’s High Street taskforce, the flexible working taskforce, the socio-economic taskforce, the green technical advisory group, and the hospitality sector council adding any value to business? Does the Department of transport really need to be checking the amount we walk and cycle to meet its target to increase the amount we walk to “365 stages per person per year in 2025,” and make sure the population cycles 1.6 billion stages a year?

Too often Conservative Ministers seem to have given up on reducing the size and cost of the state and decided that we are simply too old and incompetent to look after ourselves. The National Audit Office has found, in the last two years in the NHS there has been a “reduced management focus on cost control and operational rigour,” the same could be said of the rest of the public sector.

The argument that if only the public sector had more people and more money it would provide a Rolls Royce service has been clearly disproved by the past three years. Services are noticeably worse and with overall public sector their productivity 7.6% lower than before the pandemic, taxpayers are clearly not getting value for their money. Now is surely the time for ministers should revive the discipline of trying to do doing more with less or not doing some things at all.