Public Services: Workforce (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Friday 16th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, on this excellent report—indeed, on a series of reports that have added a lot to my knowledge of the challenges facing public services. It was an excellent idea of whoever decides these things in this place to set up a Public Services Committee, and I think that it has proved its value. I have learned a lot.

I have a few remarks to make, which may be politically sharp but which are none the less deserved. First, we will never solve the problem of the public sector workforce if the Government continue to take the view that they intend to use holding down public sector pay as a battering ram for bringing down inflation. If that is the approach, it will result in a disaster for public services. It is not just a matter of what happens this winter—it is going to be a long-term challenge to get inflation down, but we cannot do it by basically sacrificing public services. At the moment, private sector pay is going up by around 6% while public sector pay is at 2% to 3%: that is not sustainable. The Government must know that; we are losing people from the public services to the private sector, and something must be done about it.

My second point is that the Government must recognise the need for investment if we are going to save money. The willingness to put money into public services that would in fact save money is absolutely vital. The most obvious case of this is social care reform where, clearly, a lot of the problems of the NHS would be a lot less if we had a properly functioning social care system, and we are not going to have that unless we have a comprehensive reform of pay and conditions and how the whole thing is managed.

A similar example of investor-save is in the hugely escalating costs of children in care. I know this as a Cumbria county councillor—I apologise; I should have already declared that interest. The hugely escalating costs of children in care are a real problem. Josh MacAlister’s review points to a way of tackling this. It was debated in the House last week but, unfortunately, I could not be present. It is, again, an example of where you have to put some money up front if you are going to save money in the long run.

Thirdly, we need active labour market policies for the public sector. We are in a situation where workforce participation is in fact declining. This is a very serious situation for the country, and we need a strategy to get it up again. I was talking to some Swedes yesterday at a seminar. The Swedish model has always put high employee participation as a top priority. If you get high employee participation, you get the tax revenues that enable you to improve public services. So we really need a strategy for filling all these jobs—getting older workers, perhaps on a part-time basis, back into services. We need a comprehensive strategy.

My final point is that we must have radical reform. We have to be prepared to upset people—like the professional institutes. If we are going to have an expansion of the apprentice route in public services, that will upset a lot of people who think that only graduates can do the job. We have to be prepared to be tough on that. The old new Labour mantra of “investment and reform” is what public services need today more than anything else, and I would like to know what plans the Government have for both investment and reform.