Public sector workers what would you change?

[cunoyerjudowel]

So there's a lot of talk about how the eee is a massive shortfall in the budget and how bad it is in the public sector.

So where do you work (as in teaching / council / hospital etc)?
How bad is it?
Where do you think savings could be made?
What do you need to provide the service the public need ?
What would you scrap?

I personally don't think many people realise how critically underfunded the public services are

To truly respect and value the art and science of good management.

To enable people to progress in their careers through taking either a technical specialist route, OR a people management route. Just because you're good nurse/teacher/youth worker/therapist or whatever, by no means means you'll be a good people manager.

To bite the bullet and get rid of underperforming staff and managers of all stripes, and enable the talented, committed and hardworking ones to do their jobs in peace.

I've worked in both the public and private sectors - the myth of the slacker, incompetent public sector worker and super efficient competent private sector worker is exactly that - a myth.

What is hugely different IME is it is much, much harder to recruit effectively in the public sector.
If public sector jobs are all flexible working and finishing early why aren't people queuing up to do them?
Why is there a recruitment and retention crisis in teaching, care homes, nursing staff etc?

Critical services jobs should be paid accordingly. We can live without digital marketers or gaming coders or whatever. We can't do without hospital and school staff.

A lot of services should be seen as more interlinked, and there be a better understanding that investment in each area directly impacts other areas, eg funding in mental health supports education / adult services etc, funding in education and Early Years reduces risk of prison in later life, elderly social care reduces need for health in older age and so on.

Ex Civil Service (HMRC)

We used to give good service to tax payers, you knew which office dealt with your tax, you could phone or call in & speak to the person who dealt with everything regarding your case, if you sent a letter you had a name who you could send it to with a direct phone number to contact them. Then offices got merged into one massive office, from 7 offices we were all merged into one office, & you never knew who dealt with your tax. After a few years, the face to face contact stopped, then all calls were routed to a contact centre within the office where staff got a week's training & a manual of scripts to deal with everything, no specialist knowledge of different employers or different methods of taxation. Then some idiot thought of a system called LEAN, you spent half the day counting what you had done, everything had a maximum time for doing it but they had worked out the times entirely on straightforward cases, if anything was complicated it messed up your figures & your manager wanted to know why. Every day, each team had to have a 20 minute meeting about the figures, then the managers had to have a meeting about the meeting & then the managers managers had to have a meeting about the meetings, we worked out that the time the meetings took equalled 5 × full time staff a week that would have cleared the backlogs. Then they changed the computer system that made everything take 3 times as long, you couldn't just view a record & move through each function while viewing the record, you were having to do everything 3 or 4 times but were expected to do it at the old timings. Then the government decided that tax offices were not needed, they shut 90% of the offices & opened processing factories, you could live in Cornwall but your affairs were processed in Glasgow but if you rang up, the contact centre was in Manchester & couldn't view anything on your record if you actually got through on the phone. You could be stuck in a queue for hours & days, only to be told that they would send a message to the processing factory where it could take months for it to be dealt with & underpayments keep on mounting up or you could be owed thousands & wait years for a repayment. We had a good service & they fucked up the whole system to save money but in reality they aren't saving anything because cases of tax evasion aren't investigated & at least millions remain unpaid, probably billions that could help cover some of the 22 billion pound black hole we are now going to be made to suffer for.

I think in the public sector it is very hard to get rid of "problem children" staff who have been there a long time and go off sick / don't perform etc but the system is to broken and over worked to deal with them so just moves them or gives into their demands

Due to services which are supplied to certain sectors as in police / military needing to be vetted etc they then can charge a premium - it's ridiculous.

£800 in 2008 to put 3 notice boards up, I ended up doing it myself as the cost sickened me

Then the low wages only attract young people as older people can not afford to accept them.

In the police you do 24/7 shifts and have days off cancelled at the drop of a hat, if you have small children you need your partner to be flexible or a sahm. The salary of a cop can not provide this.

Also we used to get loads of ex army and career change people but this has stopped due to the salary just not rising which has meant we have new cops who are so young and are going to horrific situations or expected to advise in domestics etc

If you pay poor then you don't always attract the talent

I

People can sit and talk together in open plan offices. People can take teams calls in open plan offices, just get head phones. There are no confidentiality issues in my office and yet people still don’t go in.

Well yes as long as I don't talk or have confidential info on my screen! We have confidential shared offices but our team, for some reason, isn't based in one.

I can sit at home and have detailed confidential meetings in my study - would you like me discussing your child's drug use or criminal activity next to someone who possibly knows your neighbours?

Get rid of the police and crime commissioner.

The people at the top of organisations never have open plan offices or " hot desks"

The opposite in my LA. Advisory roles cut from 150 to just 10 posts.

These 10 roles are to implement the statutory duty of the LA only ( safeguarding, early years provision, attendance and SEN).

DfE money to support schools to improve no longer goes to the LA but to the teaching hubs and programmes ( phobic hubs, maths hubs, NCETM, etc).

You are one team. You are trying to extrapolate from your team to the entirety of the LA workforce. The rest of them are not refusing to go in because of confidentiality issues.

If you come back claiming you were not trying to extrapolate to the entire LA workforce, then what on earth was the point of your post, being as I was talking about a whole rather than your individual team?

The Directors at my last employer did.

On top of what has already been posted about education.

Management in schools needs to be held accountable for poor decisions, bad management and bullying out of professionals.

Ex-NHS manager here. Totally agree with this. There are crap staff who just roll along merrily for 20 years and are either moved around or just ignored.

They need to go, but it's impossible to manage anyone out in the NHS because of the unions. So I don't know what can be done.

The problem is years of weak growth and insufficient GDP per capita to run all these services in the way that is needed. Billions of pounds wasted on unnecessary things or with poor value for money (eg substandard PPR during COVID, corruption, MOD paying £bns to store stuff that's rusting away). Attenpts to save money that end up costing more in the long run - e.g. insuffucient NHS staff on rotas necause of inadequate pay and poor conditions, so more locums are needed at much higher cost. I don't think there are any quick fixes but for sure there are some sensible things to do. Something like 40% real terms decrease in my world.

I work in NHS Comms and I agree. It's ludicrous. Lots of us do nothing for long periods. Or we do absolutely pointless campaigns that reach very few people. I am a bit demoralised!! But the levels of management are crazy, not just in Comms. Some of the Teams meetings are beyond parody with a giant elephant in the room - none of us could reasonably be said to be benefiting patients in any tangible way. I am very pt, which helps and I stay very healthy and fit, which I often joke is the best thing I do for the NHS.

Work in local authority….everything is striped to the bone, I’m currently working 3 three peoples jobs. I can barely keep up with everything, spinning high level stuff wondering when the plates are going to drop.everyone is stressed. Childrens services are the ones always over budget because their are so many kids in care now. All councils are at breaking point

This.
Special needs in primary schools is at an absolute crisis point and, if my school is anything to go by, secondaries are not going to know what has hit them in two years time.
We are a very big primary (4 form entry) but we currently have 40 pupils whose SEN is so high, they are unable to access mainstream teaching. These are non-verbal, nappy wearing, high needs children. We are doing our best but we are not meeting their needs and there are no specialist placements available. From our Year 4s down, the numbers of these children are increasing on year on year. The staffing levels required to try and support them are the reason that our budget is in deficit.
Government needs to be looking at how these children can be supported and educated properly and why this is happening.

I'd have a less top heavy NHS. More junior doctors with greater autonomy, fewer but better trained admin staff with a more direct relationship with the day to day management, more clinical nurse specialists and fewer consultants. A consultant led service is a fallacy of poorly trained juniors cf previous generations. It's unnecessarily expensive.

Yes, I would have fewer non clinical managers and have more management training for the consultants. The service needs to be led by those who are delivering it. Otherwise the point of the service is lost. It isn't just to keep individuals happy, it's to prioritise excellent clinical care in an equitable fashion.