The week in public services: 23rd July 2019
This week: Boris Johnson’s priorities; public sector pay rises; and ‘algorithmic austerity’
New Government
So then. Boris Johnson is the new PM. It’ll probably be out-of-date by the end of the week, but Tom Newton Dunn at The Sun has outlined Boris Johnson’s domestic policy priorities here. Rumours suggest he’ll focus on schools and social care — boosting funding for the former, and creating some kind of insurance scheme for the latter.
Three reminders:
Firstly — the last Government expended a lot of political capital to get through a national school funding reform in 2017, and Justine Greening ended up injecting an extra £1.3bn following public pressure about schools which might lose out. If Boris doesn’t increase the overall amount spent on schools, his Education Secretary may end up in the same position.
Secondly — the distributional consequences of his proposals to ‘end regional disparities’ in school funding would probably favour schools in areas which tend to vote Conservative — by effectively undoing the some of the effects the national funding formula, which attempts to adjust for the needs of different pupils. Can you imagine that going down well as a headline?
Thirdly — Boris is supposedly backing Matt Hancock’s voluntary insurance system for social care funding. There have been literally reams written about why a voluntary insurance system is highly unlikely to work, so I’ll just leave these two excellent blogs here and here.
General
On top of the new Government being formed, ere’s your weekly round-up of the other news in public services.
The Government announced that some public sector workers — soldiers, teachers, police officers, dentists, consultants, and senior civil servants — got a pay rise (above forecast inflation) on Monday. Will this be May’s legacy*? In many ways, we’re rehashing the same debate we had about partially lifting the pay cap last summer. In that spirit, I tweeted the four key points you need to know about the impact of public sector pay rises on public services last week.
Elsewhere, public services wonks may be interested in the collection of devolution essays that the Institute for Government published last week. Tony Traver’s essay on London devolution, and how, if at all, that’s affected public services is a thought-provoking read.
Another though-provoking piece comes from Rowland Thorpe on why austerity — and the greater use of digital technologies and algorithms that came with it — fundamentally changed the welfare state such that it won’t be possible to ‘end austerity’ just by turning the spending taps back on. Well worth reading.
And what will the new occupant of №11 Downing Street have to do? Paul Johnson imagines his first briefing from Treasury officials, whilst our director Bronwen Maddox argues (£) that his successor needs to be more vocal about the risks of leaving without a deal.
Health and Social Care
The Department for Health and Social Care’s latest accounts are out. The Guardian has the obligatory story about the share of spending going to independent providers. This is not privatisation — these services are still free at the point of use.
In the think tank world, the Social Market Foundation have published an interesting report on the challenges of an ageing population, with some remarkably novel recommendations.
Hot off the heels of the Kings Fund recent report on the Wigan deal, Simon Bottery has looked at how South Tyneside are reconfiguring social care to better draw on the strength and ‘assets’ — families and communities — of service users. He addresses the thorny question of whether we know this is effective — or just a way of rationing cash by limiting access to services. A good read.
And two very different — but equally interesting blogs — on the question of NHS dependence on international labour. At Nuffield, Claudia Leone discusses policies to encourage more nurses to come. Her suggestions include:
· Adding a question about nationality to the NHS staff survey to see if international staff have specific concerns or working preferences
· Investigating sick leave reports in more depth, interviewing nurses, to better understand nurses’ wellbeing and working conditions.
In contrast, Vivek Kotecha at the Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) take a longer view and argues that we could remedy our reliance on overseas staff by moving away from flexible labour market regulations and enhancing staff’s collective bargaining power. CHPI argue that this would lead to higher wages and more consistent investment in training, reducing the NHS’s dependence on overseas labour.
And the London School of Economics have provided a timely reminder that most people underestimate the likelihood of needing and social care and consequently do not insure against it. Repeat after me. People. Will. Not. Save. Voluntarily. Perhaps Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock should be looking at this research…
Whilst think tanks pontificate, the occasionally-perverse world of the public sector rolls on and on. The Independent report that some hospitals are taking councils to court because they think they should be entitled to receive the same discounted business rates as private hospitals.
The Health Service Journal’s Lawrence Dunhill has looked at where money hospitals raised from selling land went…mainly on helping fund day-to-day services. Great analysis of the pressures this is putting on NHS capital spending.
The Department for Health and Social Care, meanwhile, are trying to improve retention by providing ‘direct support’ to hospitals struggling with retention, which appears to have (slightly) reduced turnover rates.
And taking a bigger picture, the Department for Health and Social Care are apparently creating a “composite health index” which they will use to measure the effectiveness of health policy, akin to the way GDP is used as a proxy for the success of economic policy. Public Health England are keen on the idea.
Children and Young People
Good news! Schools are trying to reduce teacher workloads — a key driver of dissatisfaction and low retention rates. Less good news? Less than half are using the Department’s “workload reduction toolkit”, which it published last year.
Meanwhile an Ofsted survey of teachers finds that one of the biggest causes of high workloads and stress is…Ofsted. One assumes that’s not the result they were hoping for…
Ofsted has also published a report on the performance of multi-academy trusts (MATs). The report finds there is weak accountability of MATs and calls for Ofsted to be given the power to inspect MATs and provided graded judgements of them, as well as individual schools.
Want to know what the next Conservative leader will do about schools and school funding? This blog by Robert Halfon, current Conservative chair of the Education Select Committee, gives a few hints. I suspect the two candidates’ teams will be casting close eyes over it.
Speaking of things Robert Halfon has done, the Education select committee’s latest big report on schools funding contains a fair few recommendations too. We will eventually read all of it, when the politics of this week calm down a bit.
Elsewhere, there is a good summary of the financial pressures that the increasing number of children with special educational needs poses for the Government on The Conversation, and what international research suggests the solutions might be, including: better involving families in decision-making, and providing more support for teachers. Analysis from the County Councils’ Network suggests that the cost (to councils) of providing special educational needs services is rising because of growing demand, and 2014 reforms which extended councils’ statutory duty to provide support for young people with special educational needs, from all children aged 0–19 to all children aged 0–25.
In light of rising stress-related absence amongst social workers, the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care and the Local Government Association are reconsidering the social worker ‘health check’ — an annual review of the health of the social care workforce which council undertake. You can read the second years’ worth of findings, published by the Local Government Association, here.
In a sign that the Education select committee are at the very least aware of the problems, they’ve launched an inquiry to consider the children’s social work workforce, and the impact of recent reforms to social work.
Finally — an exceptionally moving Tortoise longread about the (lack of) availability for mental health services for children. The lack of accountability for allocating funding and analysing performance — from the number of serious incidents to waiting times for treatment — is genuinely shocking. As are the consequences for children and their parents: “we’ve been left with a child who could potentially kill herself; we’ve fallen through the cracks”.
Law and Order
Fascinating comparison of how criminal justice spending and staff have changed in the four nations of the UK. What we really wanted to know, though, is how performance changed too! Did Scotland’s reluctance to cut prison officer numbers translate into safer prisons? One for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies’ next report, perhaps.
A new report from the Police Inspectorate has found that older victims of crime are not well-supported by the police.
Over in probation, the Commons Justice committee have called for greater transparency on probation funding and performance in the future. We agree — we don’t cover probation in Performance Tracker due to lack of consistent data. But probation is clearly an important public service — and one receiving increasing public attention — greater transparency would be a good first step.
Interesting BBC piece on the reality of the ‘Unlocked’ prison officer training scheme — and being a new grad in prison.
Finally — the House of Commons Library have written a good blog on what a ‘public health approach to violence’ actually means, and what the Government are proposing to do. Thoroughly recommend.
*Footnote: no.
