Lazy, bureaucratic, slow, incompetent, slothful and much more

Words all too frequently heard to castigate the public sector.

We find it distasteful and unhelpful when we know of many individuals and teams who are hardworking, motivated, bright, dedicated and innovative and work in the public sector.

We thought it might be appropriate to mention some of the challenges the public sector has to face and that can be easily forgotten by many - the media and central government politicians included.

Private companies submit financial reports and a few larger ones compile subsidiary reports and hold shareholders meetings, all relatively simple, straightforward and efficient. Compare this to the public sector, even a small council.

In addition to annual audits, all key decisions are voted on by elected councillors at public meetings the minutes of which are also published. In addition a great many other items of business have traditionally been available for inspection.

And now Mr Pickles requires more transparency in addition to the historical submission of vast numbers of reports to central government and the bane of the public sector Freedom of Information Requests (FIRs). We remain unconvinced that even in principle FIRs are worthwhile, they certainly cost a lot to administer and whatever the intention the concept has been hijacked by the media, commercial companies and a tiny minority of local citizens with an axe to grind.

This level of transparency costs a lot of money, we don’t know how much but all work costs money and there is a lot of work involved.  Some councils employ permanent staff just to manage their FIRs – not to do the research and data analysis, just to manage the work.

In addition this level of scrutiny:

1. encourages group decision making
2. stifles creativity – what if this idea doesn’t work?
3. fuels paranoia and accusations of impropriety when raw data is released
4. creates further work when often meaningless raw data is queried.  Examples are not hard to find - why might a council buy large quantities of alcohol? Answer, to sell in the local civic centre.

Unless each line item in the accounts is broken down and explained in detail, release of raw data is almost guaranteed to create confusion and concern.

Consider another council exposed in the national press ‘one council even bought llamas on its credit card’. First of all precisely what is wrong with making purchases on credit (or debit cards) a fairly normal practice in many private sector firms?

Although we admit Llamas are an unusual purchase the explanation was to be found in the local newspaper and no doubt the council would have confirmed the report. The Llamas were required to help graze council land replacing 2 sheep killed by marauding dogs and to offer some protection to the remaining sheep. The council secured lottery funding for the purchase because their case was so compelling; local tax payers did not fund the acquisition. There were a range of secondary benefits; the Llamas in fact provided a very cost effective and environmentally sound solution.

One council received a FIR, how much did it spend on chocolate biscuits? Do we begrudge our civil servants the odd digestive? Even if we do, surely civilised good manners and etiquette permits refreshments to be offered to visitors?

Another revelation, council buys dog food! Why? They have a statutory duty to care for stray dogs (and the numbers of starving stray dogs is on the increase).

No doubt there are abuses, with a workforce of hundreds of thousands, to assume no bad apples or simple mistakes would be folly but the current climate is unwisely skewed. The mania for publishing details of job descriptions and salaries starts to make the whole thing very personal. And yes as an aside we do feel top executives are overpaid.

Public decision making is slothful and over complicated by comparison with the private sector there is no doubt. For anyone who takes a moment to consider why, part of the explanation is blindingly obvious. Local democracy.

From a straw poll of 6 local authorities it transpires that officials generate ideas to adapt to the changing world but these are then blocked by politicians because of local and or national party politics and the well known syndrome of politicians wishing to avoid taking unpleasant decisions before elections. Quite naturally the more levels of local democracy there are, the greater the effect.

Furthermore taxpayers require, quite naturally, that care is taken when spending our money. But the requirement to document and minutely defend almost every decision necessarily adds cost and slows the process. There is a great reluctance for individuals to take decisions when FIRs increasingly demand, either directly or indirectly, to know the names of officials who have made decisions.

Lest anyone think we view the world through particularly rose tinted glasses we know its not perfect. Examples range from the trivial, the use of multiple or panel interviews for surprisingly junior and even temporary positions, to the MOD over spend.

There is a misapprehension in some quarters that ever more detail will necessarily produce a ‘better result.’ One employee of a central government department participated in a 3 day assessment for a promotion. Since the individual concerned had been continuously employed by the department for c25 years and had been promoted before, we struggle to think what was gleaned from these tests all of which had been completed before.

A large number of private sector firms simply do not bother to compete for public sector work because there are too many hoops to jump through to win business, there is too much process and monitoring. The more astute firms realise that any information supplied in a bid or tender becomes public information and as such is accessible through freedom of information channels to competitors. Understandably many object to this.

Private companies have some freedom to choose their customers unlike many public bodies who are obliged to deal with all within their ‘patch’. This ‘duty of care’, both statutory and otherwise is abused and misunderstood by many who seek to take advantage of it:

• I want someone to come round and remove the insects on my path
• I want to complain about the state of the car park at XX’s (a major high street retailer)

Perhaps if some of these spurious and vexatious calls didn’t happen, more attention and resource might be available for real ones.

Local provision is so overcomplicated that it is often not clear as to who is responsible for what. Clearly the retailer above is responsible for their car park, not the local council but in many areas of the country we enjoy the dubious benefits of extensive local democracy and have a parish council, a town council and a county council.

We are not aware of any compendium that sets out who is responsible for what, making life a misery when something goes wrong or needs to be done: the town (district council) may cut the verges, the county council probably maintain the roads but the hedge beside the verge next to school is the responsibility of? And if you want to park your car in the town, the town council often look after the car parks and can subcontract to a private firm but what about the surrounding villages is it the parish council or the town council? A coherent reorganisation is needed.

It appears that the number of accountants in the public sector is growing (at least relative to the total office population). This seems to follow the rule that when ‘times is hard’ more accountants spend more time measuring, monitoring and controlling and as more back offices become shared the finances will become more complicated.

We have come across numerous cases of one public body engaging in long drawn out and costly negotiations, arguments and sometimes litigation with another sometimes for reasons of bafflingly complexity that defy common sense. A classic was the Health and Safety Executive decision to bring charges against senior metropolitan police officers (see Not For The faint-Hearted by John Stevens).

The trend for sharing back offices is based on the assumption that large specialist providers will always be cheaper than smaller ones. We are not convinced by this argument. Has anyone tried resolving a problem with a large Telecoms provider or indeed with an NHS business call centre? (Did you hear about the NHS body that called many middle managers to a meeting, the objective of which was to discuss and agree the agenda for the ‘real’ meeting?).Where services are shared or outsourced the spectre arises that in addition to their own accounts, public bodies will become involved in the accounts of the shared provider or at least fighting their corner with regards the fair apportionment of overheads.

The media has created such a negative environment with regards the public sector that we wonder if an unintended consequence might be a diminution in the attractiveness of careers in the sector.

If so, this will be to the detriment of us all.

The private sector is not uniformly efficient, but driven by short term profit motivation (and other factors) none guarantors of longevity. It is well known many mergers and acquisitions fail, along with a great many product launches, restructuring projects and indeed organisations. Generally we require public institutions and bodies not to fail; we require some form of stability. If there is a premium for longevity and therefore stability and continuity of service provision; so be it. This is not to suggest the premium should be significant; we are convinced there is waste and room for improvement, continuous improvement.

Part of the problem, endemic across society as a whole, is that the recruitment is based upon the notion that only narrowly defined career paths are acceptable. Be it a Sales Director role in a private company or a Head of Service role in a Local Authority, the job and person specifications almost invariably rule out candidates from beyond a very narrow pool of experience. This is almost a universal truth and we think a sad one.

There is rarely any new blood and this limits the scope for innovative thinking from outside the sector. We know that six sigma has been practiced by manufacturing concerns for over 20 years. How many government bodies can lay claim to this? How many lives has the NHS failed to save because it did not grasp the nettle at the same time as Motorola and Ford, or heaven forbid, beat them to it because they were after all only playing catch up with Japanese industry.

Arguably more important than all the above is one area that few consider, indeed we forgot in the first draft of this article. Culture. Not all, but a very large proportion of the people who enter public service do so because they have a genuine vocational passion. They want to deliver the best possible service, be it housing, social or health care or whatever. What motivates and drives them is service delivery, helping the community and individuals within it.

For many years as a generalisation public sector performance measures have been dominated by delivery metrics. Cost has been a secondary consideration, almost the complete opposite of the private sector, where profit and cash considerations predominate.  Elevating the issue of finance in the public sector is in large part a cultural challenge, there are still some staff, indeed managers, who have not cottoned on to the fact that in the current climate the old status quo has gone; forever.

The problem with changing culture is that it is very difficult and takes considerable time and resource. It is one of the reasons why so many mergers and acquisitions in the private sector don’t work (along with egotistical CEOs driving up the price and flawed due diligence processes). Whether it is right or wrong it will take a very long time for the public sector to change, irrespective of what senior politicians may wish. And this is an additional time element to the inertial issues associated with changing any large organisation.

Yes, there is waste in the sector but we contend that on the whole it does a good job, that mindless assaults on its integrity and competency serve very little purpose.

There is no magic silver bullet solution, however we have a package that will probably never see the light of day, it will not be very palatable to many politicians and others and, of course, will be dismissed because we are not experienced public sector executives, so what do we really know!

David Bloomfield, The Peter Heath Consultancy