The week in public services: 13th August 2019
This week: Johnson’s justice policy blizzard; ‘old’ and ‘new’ money for NHS capital funding; and the health benefits of an eight-hour working week
General
Drumroll, please! We finally have a confirmed spending review — though only for one year. Sajid Javid argues that this is essential to allow departments to focus on preparing for Brexit. The one-year budget allocation will allow us to see how Johnson’s short-term social care, NHS, schools and prisons pledges will be funded.
And please mind the gap between the data and the policy: a nice shout-out for Performance Tracker and the Institute for Government’s work in the Financial Times in this piece on the revealing gaps in our public data sets.
Health and Social Care
Taxing times for senior NHS staff: this great blog from the King’s Fund explains how changing pension structures mean that some clinical staff who are promoted or who undertake extra work now face large tax bills. The result? More staff turning down promotions and avoiding extra shifts, with a direct impact on patient care as staff fail to keep up with what the Financial Times describe as ‘record demand’ on the NHS.
Is there a trade-off between work and play so that Jack is not a dull boy but also has the self-esteem and social inclusion that work brings? In an interesting study considering how we can strike a balance between the need to work and rising levels of automation, research by Cambridge University investigated the minimum number of hours of work required to obtain these psychological and health benefits. The conclusion? An 8-hour working week is the optimum, with any additional hours not conferring any health benefits. Something to take up with HR…
As the social care saga continues, this select committee report is highly critical of how administrative errors have seen the Department for Work and Pensions issuing substantial overpayments of the carer’s allowance — the financial support available for anyone providing full-time care. This has left many carers with substantial debts that the department is now vigorously pursuing. Any failure to declare an income rise that takes claimants even £1 above the income threshold for the allowance results in them owing the department the full weekly allowance.
When it comes to improving adult social care, this report calls for better data on what it describes as the ‘fundamentals of social care’ — providing a list of 33 action points that the authors argue will enable us to better understand the impact of social care not only on those who receive it, but on their loved ones and the carers themselves.
In this forward-thinking report, the Health Foundation argue that the Government needs to focus on the long-term in health and social care policy, detailing the major trends and changes in the population, society, technology, politics, the environment that any Government will have to grapple with.
New money, old money, and the excluded middle? No, not the latest debate on our class system, but an excellent report breaking down the latest announcement on NHS capital funding and how much is really ‘new’.
Children and Young People
In a damning article for the Guardian, Ray Jones argues that outsourcing children’s social care is wrong and waste of money. They claim that the profit made by private companies would be better used to help children and their families.
The government have published their longitudinal study of local authority social workers in a report that aims to provide evidence on recruitment, retention, and progression in child and family social work. It tries to establish a stronger understanding of child and family social work recruitment issues, career pathways, choices and decisions and how these differ across different individual, job and employer characteristics. Disconcertingly, “one of the most striking features of the qualitative interviews was the similarity in responses and how precarious the positioning was between staying and (thinking of) leaving”…
New Social Market Foundation have also published a fact sheet on looked after children by local authority area that analyses the quality of care they receive.
This detailed report from London Councils looks at the scale of the cost pressures across both children’s social care and children with special educational needs and what is driving demand. Interestingly, this is not solely, or primarily, the number of children entering the social care system. The London-wide agreement to cap agency staff pay is apparently also not operating as planned, with councils routinely ignoring it where they have acute staff shortages.
Law and Order
In what is definitely not a pre-election policy blitz, the Prime Minister has announced expanded stop-and search powers, and 10,000 new prison places.
In addition to this, the Crown Prosecution Service is to receive an additional £85 million to tackle violent crime in England and Wales — presumably to help prosecute criminals and fill the additional prison places…
Escape to the country? The geography of drug crime appears to be changing, with police-recorded drug crime rising faster in towns and villages. However, has drug dealing decreased in the big cities? Or have there just been fewer drug busts relative to other parts of the country?
In what could be worrying news for the government’s ambitions to recruit more police officers, evidence from the jobs website Indeed suggests that police recruitment is getting harder — as fewer job applicants are expressing interest.
How to communicate ambiguity? Though this blog is a couple of years old, its points still stand: here, Gavin Hales talks about how the police often struggle to communicate the decisions they have to take when resources are constrained.
Boris Johnson has pledged an additional £100m to boost security in prisons. As the Institute’s own Nick Davies points out, this is not exactly a change in approach. In fact, given it’s the 4th such announcement in 3 years, the words ‘more of the same’ are marching with deserved confidence in the direction of this particular conversation.
After such a blizzard of policy announcements — all invariably proclaiming a ‘crackdown on crime’ — Russell Webster has helpfully summarised all of the justice announcements.
