OPINION
The number of healthcare workers has passed 2 million (Image: Getty Images)
One of the cherished pillars of conventional, left-wing wisdom has just been comprehensively demolished. For years, a noisy alliance of campaigners, politicians, and trade unionists have argued that the public sector’s failings are due to chronic staff shortages and underfunding. According to this fashionable analysis, the only way to reverse the decline is to pump more money into the state and expand its workforce.
But such claims are largely a myth. This week, new official figures for the NHS exposed the emptiness of this wailing propaganda about “lack of resources”. Far from suffering cutbacks, the Department of Health’s budget has gone up since 2019 by a whopping ￡31.5billion to a total of over ￡191billion. At the same time, the number of employees in the healthcare system has now passed two million, with over 313,000 new posts created during the same period. Compared to five years ago, there are 25% more doctors and nurses.
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Yet the NHS is sliding deeper into crisis. The treatment of patients on trolleys is a symbol of an overstretched system that is unable to cope, despite the increase in its headcount. In fact, the boost in funding and staff has been accompanied by a drastic fall in productivity, down by 19% since the pandemic.
We are paying more into the NHS, and getting less in return. The explanation lies in poor management, a reluctance to embrace new technology, outdated working practices, an inflexible centralised command structure, and misguided priorities, like the fashionable obsession with diversity.
Throughout the public sector, there is the same story of dwindling output along with workforce expansion. Contrary to the endless moans about classroom shortages, there are now 469,000 teachers in our schools, 27,300 more than in 2010, just as the total of police officers, at 170,000 is a tenth higher than in 2003. Similarly the number of social workers is up by 15% over the last five years, while the number of academic staff in our universities has gone up from 217,000 to 240,000 since 2019.
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Yet instead of making institutions more efficient, the staffing increases have achieved the opposite. This week’s data from the Office of National Statistics shows that the state payroll has grown by more than half a million since the pandemic, but productivity is down by almost a tenth.
Indeed, workforce growth has fed an indulgent, inward-looking culture which elevates staff rights above public needs. As a result, waste and duplication are rife. Whitehall’s payroll has gone up by almost 100,000 since 2016 but on social media forums, some officials are honest enough to admit that they few real duties.
“I barely have any work to do and I don’t feel challenged at all,” said one contributor last month. As an ex-Labour trade Minister Lord Digby Jones declared in 2009 that “frankly the job of civil service could be done with half as many people”. That is just as true today.
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Untested by market competition, much of the public sector is flabby and ill-disciplined, as revealed in the excessive rates of absenteeism, the attachment to strikes and the sense of entitlement over working from home, even when the type of job may make such a practice unsuitable. That is certainly the case with John Tuckett, the Government’s preferred candidate to head the independent inspectorate of borders.
For the last five years Tuckett has been the official Immigration Services Commissioner, a post he has held despite living in Finland. It was an extraordinary arrangement for such a sensitive role. During the First World War many Allied Generals were heavily criticised for basing their staff offices in French chateaux far from the Western Front. But at least – in contrast to Tuckett – they were in the same country.
The bloated public sector is not just failing to deliver value for money, but, by its heavy burden, it also dragging down the British economy. But Labour, with their links to the unions and ideological faith in the state, have given little indication that they recognise the need for change.