Last week’s workshop with public service staff started out tough. ‘People never listen to our ideas’. ‘If we start making improvements, we’ll be seen as trouble-makers’. ‘I’d be intimidated to make suggestions to management – they bully us’. By the end of the day, we had generated some ideas, gathered data and made some small-scale changes, and morale was on the up. But it was hard work.
It’s easy to criticise staff as cynical, but there are probably millions of public servants who feel this way. And this is something Innovation Unit has always worked to turn round. Political rhetoric focuses on defying ‘producer interests’, but for me this misses the point. If the last government saw public services as a machine and this one sees them as a market, I often think of them as a movement of millions, each one of whom joined up to make a difference.
Over the last two decades, much of the progress in public services has been about driving productivity. Private sector sickness absence, for example, is two-thirds that of the public sector, and these simple differences have allowed them to take on services, make improvements and make money. However, as the public sector catches up with the tricks of productivity, the outsourcing industry is running out of low-hanging fruit. As a result, it’s now being argued that market has peaked. To improve further, public services will have to crack tougher problems. To do so, they will have to find a way not just to make public servants marginally healthier and happier. They will have to give them sufficient confidence, power and responsibility to become innovators.
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