09 July 2004
The assertion that the Labour government has presided over a huge rise in the number of back-office administrative staff is a myth, according to a leading think-tank.
Analysis from the Institute for Public Policy Research showed that the proportion of workers employed in the public sector rose from 17.1% in 1997 to 18.5% in 2003 — but most of these are providing frontline health and education services.
There are still fewer people in public sector jobs than in 1992 when John Major led the Conservatives to their fourth consecutive term in office and 21.3% of people worked in the public sector, the institute said.
The IPPR report, Pay and the public service workforce, notes that public sector recruitment problems are not confined to the Southeast but also affect rural areas including County Durham, Shropshire and Herefordshire.
The institute called for pay supplements to be negotiated at local rather than regional level in order to deal with these localised pressures.
'It's too easy to talk about the North-South gap. The pattern of recruitment is more subtle than that,' Peter Robinson, a senior economist at the IPPR, told Public Finance.
The report also showed that the rapid pay growth seen in the public sector has largely been a 'catch-up' exercise to bring pay levels into line with the private sector, following the public spending squeeze of the 1990s.
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