The kneejerk political reaction to the economic crisis has been to attack and slash the public sector – although all the facts point in the opposite direction
The current political debate about public spending cuts is reminiscent of the hair-shirt days of the early 1980s, when cutting public spending was the article of faith of every zealot across the land. It ushered in an age of private affluence and public squalor from which we have spent the past decade recovering.
There is of course a huge irony in that those who argue for deep cuts in both public spending and in the numbers of staff employed in providing frontline services don’t seem to comprehend that public spending and public debt inevitably rise during a recession.
Service cuts and redundancies will not reduce the costs to the public purse but increase them in terms of lost tax revenues and higher benefit payments, as highlighted in the Association for Public Service Excellence’s recent research for the Trades Union Congress, Speaking up for public services. This also showed the direct impact that public spending can have on hard-pressed local economies, with every £1 of public spending generating a £1.64 local economic return. So cutting spending on public services has the opposite effect of what it aims to achieve.
The current mood music from all the public service Cassandras seems to drown out any semblance of reason. The mantra of public sector waste and inefficiency is repeated over and over again with little or no proper analysis or evidence provided.
Has the culture of continuous improvement and Best Value, which has been such an important driving force in public services reform and modernisation, really become obsolete? What does the hard evidence suggest?
For a start, Treasury officials confirmed last year that the public sector had made £26.5bn worth of genuine efficiency savings since Sir Peter Gershon’s programme began in 2004.
Apse has been collecting performance data on a range of frontline public services for 11 years. While it is always difficult to define absolute or linear trends, there is sufficient evidence of improvement across a whole series of performance indicators.
There are many examples which illustrate the point. In education catering, for example, the average total service cost per school meal in 2008/09 remained at the 2007/08 figure of £2.51. In Scotland, costs fell from £2.79 to £2.62. This is despite increasing costs as a result of new nutritional standards and tackling equal pay liabilities.
Meanwhile, for winter maintenance, the annual cost of salting a kilometre of road increased dramatically in 2008/09 by over 28% from £1,575 to £2,204, due to bad winter weather and heavy snowfalls. Yet the actual cost of salting planned routes per kilometre of road went down from £25.54 in 2007/08 to £23.49 in 2008/09 – a fall of 9%.
Parks and open spaces are also areas where savings have been made. Local authority horticultural services have been particularly frugal in managing costs, with the cost per hectare of maintained land rising by around 5% from 2004/05 to 2007/08 but still below the rate of inflation. At the same time, productivity has increased by 15%.
And in sports and leisure management, opening hours of facilities have increased on average by 2% and this has been matched by an increase in use. The average customer spend per head has improved slightly from £2.41 to £2.45 and the operational recovery ratio has risen from 61.93% to 62.50%.
So real-life performance data presents a different picture than the commentary on the inefficiency of local government services. It shows local public services striving to meet the challenges of providing more for less in uncertain times with increasingly uncertain prospects.
This needs to be taken into account before kneejerk responses to a crisis caused by the banking sector mean the public sector gets slashed.
Mark Bramah is assistant chief executive of the Association for Public Service Excellence
