I always rather admired the airline pilot who managed to keep two marriages going, one on either side of the Atlantic. His job gave him the perfect excuse for his absences while avoiding the risk of an awkward moment if his two wives bumped into each other in the supermarket. But that is nothing compared with when I heard that a civil servant had been accused of holding down five public sector jobs at once, using the ability to work from home in order to disguise what he was up to.
Without going into the ins and outs of that ongoing court case, it does rather raise the issue of civil service productivity. If we can end up with an employee accused of going on for months claiming several salaries, what does it say about the expectations placed on civil servants? If someone is not doing their job full-time, that ought to, in any properly-functioning organisation, be obvious from the very first day.
Public sector productivity is the scandal that the government doesn’t seem to want to take seriously
Public sector productivity is the scandal that the government doesn’t seem to want to take seriously. Labour has long accused ‘Tory austerity’ for low economic growth; the reality is that the economy is being weighed down by a public sector which is failing to increase output year on year. This is how bad it is. In August, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that in spite of a minor improvement over the previous 12 months, Total Public Service Productivity (TPSP) stood 2.5 per cent lower in 2025 than it did in 2019.
The past six years, funny enough, have seen working from home (WFH) become standard practice in many parts of the public sector. But the productivity problem is much longer-standing. Astonishingly, TPSP is just 1.8 per cent higher than it was in 1997. That is three decades in which the public services have failed to improve their performance. Keir Starmer used to drone on about how AI was going to make our public sector stunningly efficient, even hoping to fill potholes. Yet the reality is that neither AI nor even the internet has helped overcome workshy attitudes in the public sector.
There was one period over the past three decades, however, when productivity did improve modestly: funny enough, it was the years of ‘austerity’. Between 2012 and 2019, TPSP managed to increase by a modest 4.4 per cent: gains which were then wiped out during Covid and have never properly recovered. This was a period in which the coalition government, followed by David Cameron’s majority Conservative government, was bearing down on civil service numbers. From 492,000 in 2010, they fell to 381,000 in 2016 before rebounding to 523,000 this year.
At first, the rebound in numbers was blamed on Brexit, followed by Covid. Yet the pandemic and Brexit negotiations are long past, and still numbers continue to soar out of control. We have more people working in government, but what they are producing has not risen in line with their numbers.
Productivity isn’t everything, the Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman once said, but in the long run it is nearly everything. Too true. Which is why it is bizarre to hear the Left still making out that the years of ‘austerity’ killed economic growth. The years when civil service numbers were being cut were the only time in the past three decades when the public sector was contributing to economic growth. The years of WFH have led to a return to the bad old days: the public sector has once again become a deadweight being dragged along by the private sector.
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