Public Sector Productivity

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

One aspect of the great productivity mystery and great productivity debate that I want to draw to the attention of the House is the relationship between productivity and the growing practice of working from home, which I think deserves close scrutiny. There is no divine right which says you can work from home. That does not exist in the public sector or in the private sector. I am personally—it is a personal not a political view—greatly concerned that there is a newly forming class divide, and I choose my words carefully, between people who can work from home and people who just cannot. It seems to me not particularly socially desirable and certainly not always necessarily for the economic best, helping productivity, in the private sector, let alone the public sector. I know of no evidence yet on this.

This is not some sort of Adullamite cave-dwelling view of someone who does not like the great technological leaps forward that spur our social and working interactions for the good. They are vital to all of us, and distance stuff can help all of us. But looking at the Civil Service or the health service, for example, which I value, it is clear that many do not have the opportunity to work from home. Cleaners, security and caterers just have to be there. Hospitals could not function without them. They could not work without support staff, nor could the nurses or physicians, nor could the surgeons operating away.

My question is: is the working from home by an increasing number of managers and policymakers in NHS England and Whitehall departments always a good thing? I do not believe it necessarily is. Does it help, hinder or is it neutral in its effects on productivity, which seems to be lagging behind the undoubted leaps forward in technology that I applaud? This is fertile ground for the Office for National Statistics to get on and have a good look at the economic effects on productivity of working from home.

I believe very much in face-to-face contact—it is a good productivity driver where I work. Those chance meetings in corridors and over coffee spark ideas which are so hard to choreograph, let us say, on one of those rather wooden Teams meetings; I am also terribly worried that I am going to say something daft and it will be recorded and played back to me later. It is very good for new entrants to have lots of personal contacts, but it is also good for people who have been around for a bit to be knocked around by some of those new entrants and to be challenged.

Only this week, we have news that Lloyd’s of London is a bit panicky about so few people being there not just on Fridays but on Mondays, and the Lloyd’s market is one of the gems in our economic panoply around the world; I have no interest in that. More and more people in the private sector are like Sir Jim Ratcliffe of Ineos, that great engineer and businessman, who has now blown the whistle and is getting his people back to the office, particularly in the regions, which are very important to us all. I wish him luck with that— and when the whistle blows for Manchester United, in which he is an investor, which may be more challenging than getting his workforce back.

This needs a good, long look by the Government. Again, it is not a party-political thing. The Government have four or five years, I believe, in which they will have to get productivity up. I know of no evidence of serious government study on the effects of working from home. We do not want it to be embedded so that, by the end of five years, people just think there really is a divine right to do what they want and work how they want.