Public Services: Workforce (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Friday 16th December 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

That this House takes note of the Report from the Public Services Committee Fit for the future? Rethinking the public services workforce (1st Report, HL Paper 48).

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to talk about this today. I hope I get through it without losing my voice, and I apologise to the House for having a cold.

This is the third report from the Public Services Committee and continues our previous work focused on making sure that public services across the board can be fit for the future. The public services workforce—teachers, nurses, social workers and others—is really facing a crisis. Demand for services is going up and the number of people available to deliver them is going down. This is an inescapable demographic fact, and it will get worse. People are overstretched, underpaid and unable to deliver what is asked of them. We received compelling evidence that those in our valued workforce really do not feel valued at all and are voting with their feet, leaving the jobs they have loved to work elsewhere. Staff who remain are expected to deliver more and more. This has a real effect on us all—on the public. We can clearly see this in recent daily reports of crises in the health service: delays, waiting lists and patients in danger. This is not a new story.

Here are two examples, although the problem goes throughout the public sector. The NHS and social care have more than 100,000 vacancies, and the Government missed the recruitment target for teachers in STEM subjects by 46% this year. So the staff who are in post are not having a good time of it. We heard that staff across public services were suffering, exhausted and overstretched, facing unmanageable workloads. Many feel disempowered and unrecognised.

We heard far too many reports of bullying and discrimination towards women, people with disabilities and people from ethnic minorities working in the public services. We also heard from some of them who wanted to work in a public service, but the service was simply not able to adapt to employing them. In the report we call for much more flexibility in how services are organised and therefore delivered.

We know the workforce is in crisis, but it is not unsolvable. What is required is for the Government to really get a grip of the situation. Recruitment targets are all very well, but we need to see action to boost staff numbers and make sure that people stay in those jobs.

The Government’s response to our report was not quite as quick as I was hearing in the previous debate, but we eventually got it and I thank the Government for that. Although the Government agreed with “all the Committee’s recommendations”, they did not indicate the step change we were arguing for in thinking about how the workforce for the future in the public sector is developed. The response set out activity in individual departments. While some actions may very well prove valuable—I hope they do—there seems to be little co-ordination between departments.

One potential place for a more cross-cutting set of actions that the Government’s response did highlight was the employment Bill. The response stated that this was due in 2022. I suspect we are not going to see it in 2022, and I would be grateful if the Minister could give us an update on the progress of that Bill.

Our report includes an action plan, which sets out our priorities for securing the sustainability of the workforce. I cannot possibly speak to everything in our plan today, but I will focus on some key points. The first is prioritising preventive services to reduce demand and improve outcomes for the public, for patients in health, for children and young people in education, and so on. Another is taking more flexible approaches to recruiting, training and employing public services staff. We learned a lot about this during Covid and we should not forget some of those lessons. The other points are improving retention through addressing career progression and training issues and thinking more imaginatively about how staff can be empowered and deployed more effectively. I also stress that the response to this crisis needs to be strategic and across government.

Putting more time and more money into preventive services is essential. It means that we can nip problems in the bud before they become too large, complex and entrenched. This not only will reduce demand for public services but is in many cases what public services staff actually want to do. I have seen examples around the country where local authorities have worked in a different way with their staff, giving them much more authority over tackling a problem rather than meeting a set of criteria. That has absolutely transformed their commitment and the outcomes for the public. We know that it also reduces distress and pressure on the people experiencing the service, as well as the people delivering it. Despite this, we see that preventive services are being cut. The Health Foundation reports that the public health grant, for example, has been cut by 24% on a real-terms per person basis since 2015-16, and that this has been greater in more deprived areas.

Of course, people have to want to come and work in the public sector. Perhaps the less we say on advertising and branding the better. We had an extraordinary evidence session, with people giving different examples of how they recruited in the public and private sectors. We heard that in the public sector it was “unappealing” and “stale”, and that job applications could take up to six months. It took people a long time to complete the application forms. There are other ways of doing this and the public sector has to get up to speed. These are easy fixes, but on which no commitments have been made.

Fundamentally, though, we have to offer more: more flexibility, more opportunities, and a better work/life balance. We also have to make sure that we are not closing ourselves off to talented candidates who cannot afford the training. Multiyear degree requirements, which land people thousands of pounds in debt, are no longer sustainable for our key workers. This is often a hard message for the professional organisations but it is one that must be given.

Our best way round this—apprenticeships—is underutilised in the public services. Apprentices make up an average of only 1.7% of staff in large public sector employers. Although there has been some welcome progress, the Government have not reinstated the apprenticeship target, asked employers about difficulties in hiring them, or begun to sort out the funding for them in a sustainable way.

We were struck by local examples of how to address these problems. Camden Council actively targets people who volunteered during the pandemic—people who worked in food banks, for example, and volunteers in libraries and other public services. It developed a talent pool, signposts people to roles, offers appropriate courses for them to do basic training and helps them with their CVs to make sure that the workforce of tomorrow is more reflective of its local community, resilient, and representative. We called for significant investment and leadership to replicate this elsewhere, but the Government’s response made no commitments on this.

Alongside recruiting new workers, we need to make sure that we keep the excellent people we already have in the public service workforce. This is not currently the reality. There are many reasons for poor retention in public services, but we also know that pay is a perennial issue. As the country faces a cost of living crisis, the Government need to accept the simple reality that if public services workers cannot afford to feed their families or keep their homes warm, they will leave. The current swathe of strikes has affected this debate. Several of my committee members are unable to be here as they needed to get back to where they come from. The train strike prevented them speaking today, so this is the appropriate time to give their apologies.

The Trussell Trust recently reported that nurses and teaching assistants now rely on food banks to stay afloat, and during our inquiry we heard that care workers were moving to work for supermarkets, Amazon or whatever to get better pay. As I said, the ongoing strikes demonstrate that this is a serious issue.

However, this is not just about pay. We heard about struggles to develop careers in public services. Health Education England told us that staff too often feel like

“‘rota fodder’, rather than a future resource to be nurtured.”

In a jobs market where people increasingly move around to get different experience and develop “portfolio careers”, we need to make sure that public service employers are supporting staff to grow and develop, instead of the situation where training is not funded or prioritised in services.

One area where this was particularly stark was social care. We heard that care staff in particular struggled to get their skills and experience recognised. The Government are in the process of developing a “knowledge and skills framework” to address this. I hope the Minister can provide an update on how that is progressing.

Alongside efforts to boost recruitment and retention, to address the crisis in the public services workforce we need creative and innovative thinking about how services can be delivered and staff deployed. During the pandemic, Wigan council gave its workers the opportunity to do some work on the front line. That transformed their idea about what the job was about, what they could do and how they could do it. It boosted the retention and involvement of workers. I know that some NHS trusts are supporting staff to develop skills through secondments and so on. We need to take the long view that that sort of work will help staff stay in public services, rather than just the specific job they were recruited for.

We also heard all sorts of examples of the untapped potential of public services staff needing to be used. We met a physician associate. They have to have a degree and then do three years of training, but they are still not allowed to do things such as prescribing, if they work in a GP practice. They are not allowed to do a whole round of things, nor are they allowed to transfer to be a doctor; they would have to start again. This is nonsense. The Government need to take on the restrictive practices of professional bodies and, with regulators, help change that sort of thing.

There were other things I wanted to say, but my voice is going and my time is up. I thank everyone who gave evidence and all the members of the committee. I thank the staff of the committee for their work on the inquiry: Tom Burke, Claire Coast-Smith, Sam Kenny, Daphné Leprince-Ringuet, Aimal Fatima Nadeem and Tristan Stubbs. They all worked really hard, with the team changing over in the middle. We thank them all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank everyone for their contributions. Anyone listening to the debate today will know that, across the piece, this House understands that public services are central to the lives of people in this country. Whoever we are, whatever our age or culture, they are essential to our safety, our education, our opportunities for skill development. Public services are important across the piece and, therefore, how we view their main part—the workforce—is critical.

The report makes it clear that there has to be a step change in how the Government approach that overall. Members today have made some very telling points about individual aspects of public service, but they have also said that, overall, unless we value, give opportunity and are creative and flexible, we will not be able to offer the public service that the population of this country not only need but are saying they want.

I hope this report can be taken up by the Government. We were very disappointed that a Cabinet committee on public service reform, set up in the Cabinet Office at the beginning of the 2019 Government—that seems a long time ago now—met only once; it is certainly not there any more. Without that sort of attention, the Government will not be able to answer the questions that this committee has raised. I was not able to raise all of them, but thankfully, other people have helped me out today: on the importance of civil society, of lived experience and of using that in both the design and delivery of services. I was not able to answer a whole range of other things, but they are in the report.

I hope that Members who were not part of the debate today will none the less take the opportunity to look at the report and that all of us will make sure that we do our bit to produce a public service workforce that is fit for the future.

Motion agreed.