The usual suspects at the Torygraph took great delight yesterday in running a piece on a fanciful bit of research by a consultancy house that attempted to portray public sector as wasting two thirds of their working time. It was a stunning piece of PR.
The so far unheard of Knox D’Arcy consultancy interviewed just 36 public sector managers but claimed this proved that too many managers wasted time doing administrative tasks whilst staff were unproductive and not doing what they were supposed to be doing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7951842/Council-staff-waste-two-thirds-of-their-day.html
Councils provide frontline services that are labour intensive out of necessity everything from home care to school meals, from bin collections to street cleaning, means that staff must be deployed on the job carrying out work as necessary. The idea that dinner ladies can waste two thirds of their time is fanciful.
The complaint from most of our members in this sector is that they work unpaid overtime simply to get the meals out on time to the school kids. So too with bin men. Reconfiguration of collection rounds has meant many literally run the round to get the bins collected.
Even official government bodies have recognised productivity has improved. Refuse collection productivity improvements have seen recycling levels in the UK rocket. Across all frontline areas local council absence levels have improved. Some have levels as low as 2% reported in building cleaning services – provided predominantly by low paid part time workers. And local government managers are not the ner’do wells painted either. Most work voluminous amounts of unpaid overtime, unheard of in the private sector and without the fat cat salaries to go with it!
There are always ways and means to improve productivity and this will be a difficult debate for the union to have. It can and will lead to some thorny situations which members will not like but we need to have that debate. New processes and new techniques in providing services will be drivers for increased productivity and efficiencies. What we can’t concede is that like the trite Ghetty image used by the Torygraph, of a supposed council worker with his feet on the desk, is a valid reflection of the council workforce. It is a far cry from the frazzled reality of covering for vacant posts, unpaid overtime and immeasurable pressure as public service budgets shrink whilst demand for those services continues to increase.
Mr D’Arcy your interference is harmful and wrong.
