Public sector managers inferior, says economist

20 Oct 05
Managers in the public sector came under fire from a leading economist at the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers annual conference this week.

21 October 2005

Managers in the public sector came under fire from a leading economist at the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers annual conference this week.

John Kay, a former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told the conference in Edinburgh that the quality of public sector management was inferior to that in the private sector.

He said that in terms of wealth creation, non-market activities such as education and health care used up the resources that the wealth creators provided.

In this respect, people who were 'about as low as you could get in the pecking order of roles in society' were public sector managers.

Kay, who specialises in relationships between economics and business, said: 'People who are managing the public sector are either people who know they couldn't make it in the private sector or are too risk-averse to believe that they could. Hence, it follows that the quality of public sector management is necessarily and inescapably inferior to [that of] private sector management.'

Rejecting the idea that the private and public sectors were fundamentally different in their organisation and motivation, Kay argued that functions were performed best by people who were proud of what they were doing.

The job of managers in both the public and private sectors was to encourage that pride. In that sense, the nature of public and private sector organisation were fundamentally identical.

He went on: 'All of us who have been engaged in any form of public sector management acknowledge that most people in Britain find it a more satisfying experience to deal with Tesco than with the DSS.

'That is true, even if the DSS is primarily in the business of giving them money and Tesco is primarily in the business of taking it away.'

Barry Quirk, Solace president and chief executive of the London Borough of Lewisham, called for a greater recognition of the fact that local authorities and their managers were not just delivery agents for services but were responsible for social and economic development.

Stressing that the government and the Treasury were serious about change taking place in local government, he said: 'I think most of the discussion emanating from central government implies we are a service delivery agency.

'We need to look beyond the service delivery model to one that is a local stewardship and service delivery model.'

PFoct2005

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