In 2013, the Hay Group, business and public sector consultants, surveyed 1000 public sector employees on their feelings about their work. 72% of them – nearly three out of four – said they did not feel proud to be working in the public sector. 43% wanted to leave their current employer and 70% said they were experiencing all-time low morale. There are other disturbing figures in the report. They caused a brief flurry in the media and then one or two articles started to appear casting doubt on the findings. Then it was conveniently forgotten.
It should not have been forgotten and government should have seen the report as a serious danger signal. These people who are unhappy in their work are the very people whose work should be satisfying. In general, they did not choose their career because it promised the greatest financial rewards; they chose it because they were looking for a satisfying and worthwhile occupation in which they could be of benefit to others. And we have deprived them of that satisfaction. Of course we ourselves, the patients and parents and citizens whom they should be looking after, are suffering too because they cannot put their hearts into their work.
The Hay Group report contained only a short series of answers to questions. It is one of those reports which management consultants prepare and issue to drum up business. Its findings might perhaps be questioned, if they did not correspond so clearly with one’s own personal experience. The report was based on 1,000 public sector employees working in local and central government, health and social care, and education. It did not cover the police or the military. Among those it did cover, the results were pretty consistent. For example, lack of pride in the public sector was most strongly felt among local government employees (77%). Among central government employees it is 71%, among teachers 71% and among NHS workers 67%. But these are trivial differences.
Perhaps the most interesting conclusion in the report is the sense one gets that public sector employees undervalue themselves and the importance of their role in society. This has not happened just because of bad public sector management, bad as that management often is. Their feelings reflect public attitudes, particularly among the business people who mainly support the Conservative party. We tend to disparage anything which is provided by the community free of charge, on the cynical business principle that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The profit motive is not everything and financial incentives are not always the right ones.
Of course this is a very big issue, or many very big issues. The problems of the NHS are very different from those of the education service. The police are different again. But they all have this in common, that their problems probably shouldn’t be seen primarily in terms of money. The community needs to ensure that it is getting value for its money. And the oft-quoted remedy that efficient management should be brought in from the private sector is not necessarily the right one. Private sector companies operate within the disciplines of the market and the need to make a profit. Public sector management needs to be different. Take the NHS for example. My own experience suggests that some hospitals are run well and others very badly. The talent and experience is probably there within the existing pool of management – it’s just a question of making sure that the right people are put in the right positions and the management solutions that work best are copied elsewhere.
UKIP must take up the cause of the maltreated and undervalued public sector employees, not only for the very good reason that it is one of the major problems in our society, but also for the political reason that most of these people currently vote Labour or don’t vote at all.
If UKIP is to move forward and gain the power to decide government policy, we need to increase our appeal to disillusioned ex-Labour voters. Not all of these ex-Labour voters are working-class people in the old industrial areas; many are public-sector professionals, the people who read the Guardian. But to get their votes, we need to study their problems in more detail and – perhaps with their help – work out an approach to the right solutions.
UKIP ought to set up a UKIP Think Tank, to research policy options and recommend new policies to the leadership generally. Public sector morale should be one of the first issues to be investigated.
Perhaps, as a first step, members with relevant experience and/or expertise would like to write comments on this article.
Photo by Blaye Côtes de Bordeaux 
I have to say the idea of targeting disgruntled public sector voters, guardian reading or otherwise, sounds beyond parody to me. Call me bitter but quite apart from the fact that my civil service ex is now enjoying a pension worth about ten times my privately funded, 2008-mauled one, or that public sector pensions are an enormous elephant in the uk financial deficit room, there must be far more approachable groups of potential supporters to target first, not least VAT registered SME operators… but that’s another story.
My point is reward the people that want to work. Whether as employers such as I who are trying to keep small businesses alive or as employees who have a barely concealed contempt for people who prefer not to work and sponge of the rest of us. Because the imbalance is now so far pushed against the working fraternity that the Corbynista aligned cliques could become a serious threat.
Mr Nailer elsewhere noted the wise words of president Jefferson and that issue is very much alive today. I’m not sure disenfranchising non working voters will have much appeal but promoting making work pay, will.
Labour doesn’t represent working people any more. Conservatives generally do but the Thatcher legacy is too toxic for some and Cameron was not any kind of Conservative I recognise.
But The “logic” that people on benefit, through choice rather than disability, should be equal or even better off than people who do work should be a fundamental point of challenge in my humble opinion, because it reaches out to both sides of the political divide which coexist within ukip, and has remained unchallenged for far too long.
Make work pay would be my choice. (Preferably just after making ukip work)
Mike, the problem with public service employment was ans is inevitable. The Labour party has used the public sector funding as an election weapon since the welfare state and NHS got going in 1948.
All the time the expectations of the voting public has been increased because of election promises to the point that requires an unaffordable public sector.
The socialist have dominated the education sector since the inception of the Labour party has caused syllabuses to be left wing and include pseudo science such as climate change and extended social science and political correctness.
Women now largely dominate the teaching profession and males are constantly being demonised for behaviour which is genetically wired in order to procreate the species.
Dumbing down of education and the goal to get 50% of students into university makes a mockery of the education system and teaching has become as much about bureaucracy to meet social needs as it is about actual teaching. I imagine male teachers actually feel worse off than their female counterparts.
Male children do not learn as well from female teachers as they do with good male role models. there is an argument for going back to sex segregated schools so the boys are not distracted by the female presence and are less liable to be fall fowl of the look but don’t touch rule.
The NHS has become the biggest gravy train in Europe employing lots of pseudo medical personnel as well as herds of admin and management staff and like the teaching profession lots of bureaucracy.
Town Halls and Councils are not generally liked by the public because like all public service workers they enjoy pensions the rest of us can only dream of. The working conditions are easy and the incomes are high and year on year as the pension wage bill increases the services are cut. Eventually it will reach a point where all the council tax goes to pay the wages of the office workers and pensions of those retired are there will be no outside services at all. That’s when heads start appearing on railings.
A while ago a Council leader said he was going to make all his county hall employees redundant and use the council tax to employ outside contractors to do all the work. I don’t know if that actually happened but it seems like a wonderful idea.
I realise my point of view is extreme towards the public sector but I worked this all out as a young man that I would never be happy with myself unless I could earn my living by my own creativeness and productivity.
I always considered the butcher and baker and the furniture maker and farmer as being fundamentally more important to society than the estate agent or solicitor or someone sat in an office somewhere doing virtual work. Strangely they are amongst the lowest paid in society and the least respected. They also have rubbish pensions like most other private sector workers.
Anthony, I agree with every word of what you write – the sense of entitlement was deliberately fostered by Labour and has led, certainly in,this house, to a huge resentment that we are funding this greedy bunch of jumped-up nonentities in the Public Sector.
My partner gets up at 4.30 a.m to set up his market stall. Maybe but not always someone manages to arrive on time (about 6.30) to open up the market hall, which is often filthy despite 4 cleaners employed at vast expense (and with a pension at the end of their ‘working’ lives) to shift detritus from place to place with a high pressure hose (brooms and dustpans involve ‘elf and safety issues). Don’t get me started on the state of the Market toilets, which involves yet another Council ‘worker’. Then there’s the Rent Collectors (two of them) the Market ‘Manager’ and him upstairs who is never seen. At days end the rubbish, boxed stacked and folded and bagged by the stall holders, is hurled all together into a Council Rubbish Lorry by the cleaners, who are back after a refreshing rest, and carted off to landfill instead of being recycled separately as the stall holders intended it to be.
My partner, arriving home at 7 pm, has to stump up to both employ and pension all these people, from just one Market Hall, by paying a Council Tax which increases every year.
I think the Public Sector employees here know full well on which side their bread is buttered, and will vote accordingly.
The trick is to convince people that by joining UKIP, they have influence in the formation of policy and to be able to demonstrate that the claim is true. I’m not saying we have internal referendums on every issue but there must be a clear path between branches and HQ. Until now that’s not been apparent, even though it was possible to some extent, as the calls for an EGM demonstrated. ( I wonder how that is progressing? )
This is an exciting period in UKIP’s history and whilst patience is obviously required, there is still time to snap up new votes.
We are all being asked to put up candidates for every county seat in May. To do this we need to know where we’re all heading, candidates are reluctant come forward without knowing what they are expected to support. We have no whips in local government but we must still be all pulling in the same general direction.