The Week 29 November 2024

It’s been a pretty big week in Westminster. MPs vote on the private member’s bill on assisted dying today; the Transport Secretary has resigned; the PM did a “double take” when he saw the revised immigration figures released yesterday (net migration was 906,000 in the year to June 2023, falling almost 200k the following year); the CQC maternity survey released yesterday saw further declines in trust in services and access to staff and information, adding more evidence to the woeful state of maternity care in the NHS; and for the first time the NAO has refused to sign off the whole of government accounts due to the absolute collapse of local government financial reporting (watch this space for our ideas to address this).

And… we had the first white paper of the new Government, published by DWP and signed by no less than four cabinet ministers (Kendall, Streeting, Phillipson and Reeves). ‘Get Britain Working’, according to that quartet, “sets us on a path to bring down economic inactivity levels and takes the first steps to delivering our long-term ambition to achieve an 80% employment rate”. Sounds good.

However, while there’s plenty of positive steps, the sum of the white paper’s parts does not add up to a radical redrawing of a system that has failed to grasp the challenge of economic inactivity for decades.

So what’s good? A real focus on place-based interventions, empowering metro mayors and injecting (a relatively small amount of) cash to enable local join-up. A youth guarantee (also starting small, with eight “trailblazers”),and (generally positive) steps to reform the Apprenticeship Levy. A particular NHS wait list focus in areas of high economic inactivity.

And the bad? Despite stating that “The DWP-led health and disability benefits system is not well designed to promote and enable employment”, meaning “fundamental reform” is needed, this is being pushed to next year. We are told to expect a green paper in “Spring 2025”, which will kick off a formal consultation. In other words, that means urgently needed reforms won’t be happening any time soon.

So while we may be “on a path” to tackling economic inactivity, it’s going to be a very long one, with, at least for now, limited success — and that’s not good news for mission growth.

Graph of the week…

…which is attached to our read of the week, by the ever fascinating former senior civil servant Pamela Dow, on how a ballooning HR complex is suffocating productivity — something we seem to be an outlier in allowing to take hold. The New Statesman piece is well worth your time.

As Dow points out, this might be a good thing if the rise in HR was matched by a rise in worker retention or productivity, but “HR expansion is not coinciding with desirable things and appears to be coinciding with undesirable ones.”

In our recent paper, ‘Making the grade’, we also addressed the growth in HR with Whitehall. “There has been more than a 50 per cent increase in the number of people working in the HR profession between 2016 and 2023, rising from 8,220 to 12,470. 126 An FOI request for this paper found that 920 FTE staff now work in the GPG in Cabinet Office alone (with a further 119 FTE employees working in the department’s own HR team).” Pointing out that it is remarkable that at the same time we’re failing to properly identify, recruit and promote talent, and “so few line managers feel well supported to deal with poor performers.”