Last year the ONS began a review of its measurement of public services productivity. With public services currently equating to around one-fifth of the economy, Debra Prestwood looks at how the work is progressing and ahead to some new insights.
Unlike the private sector, where money changes hands for goods and services, measuring the output of public services, and so productivity, is much more challenging. Over the past year we’ve made a huge amount of progress in our plans to transform our measures of public services productivity. As well as further developing quality measures (so we don’t just assume money spent equals services delivered) for outputs within healthcare and education, we are working on improvements for social security administration and the measurement of productivity of taxation administration for the first time
Why it matters
With public services currently equating to around one-fifth of the output of the UK economy, it is vital that statistics in this area provide a true reflection of changing productivity and are as accurate as possible.
The collective package of data released today by the ONS will provide insight into where productivity could potentially be improved in the public sector by investing in better practices, skills, structures and innovation.
Today’s analysis
It is equally important that decision makers have a good understanding of how that output is produced, such as how public sector workers spend their working time and how organisations are managed. To this aim, at the start of the year, we published experimental findings from a new Public Sector Time Use Survey, which asks public sector workers about how they spend time in their working days and is already providing vital insight into the tasks and activities public sector workers undertake.
Today we publish additional analysis of these time use data, to better understand how these results vary across sectors and what affects the results, such as whether staff have frontline duties with the public. It also includes insights from the workers themselves about their own ideas about what could save time and improve productivity.
We also today publish findings from a new pilot Public Sector Management Practices Survey and associated qualitative research. This innovative work builds on ONS expertise running the Management and Expectations Survey (MES), the largest ever survey of management capabilities in UK firms.
The new pilot Management Practices Survey systematically gathers data on how public sector organisations are run: how performance is monitored, their approaches to problem solving, improvement and employment practices. This enables us for the first time to compare management practices between the public and private sectors. Similarly to the public sector Time Use Survey, the qualitative research also investigated how administrative tasks are managed and views on the future role of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve this.
The package of data released today by the ONS will provide insight into where public services productivity could potentially be improved. This information will be extremely valuable to inform policy decisions and is the result of collaboration between the ONS and colleagues across the public sector, to develop these new surveys and secure their completion by workers and managers across the country.
Next steps – and get involved!
But this important work doesn’t stop here, as we are also developing plans to produce further analysis and run further waves of these surveys in 2025-2026, to improve understanding of how public services are delivered.
We would love to hear from our users about this important work, so if you have views on this important topic, please contact the public service productivity review mailbox: PSP.Review@ons.gov.uk.
Debra Prestwood is Deputy Director, Public Services Productivity Review at the Office for National Statistics.