Purpose
"I work to build public services and organisations that the people we care about can rely on when they are at their most vulnerable. We must make excruciatingly difficult choices when we design public services as demand rises and resources shrink, but those decisions must be made without denying anyone’s humanity, or telling ourselves that the staff, the patient, the claimant are anything other than people like us."
Cost pressure is structural
In 1966 William Baumol described a pattern that now carries his name. Where output depends directly on human time and attention, productivity cannot rise the way it does in manufacturing, and his example was a string quartet, which needs four musicians and twenty-five minutes today just as it did in 1800.
Wages in those sectors still have to track the wider economy or the staff leave, so the relative cost of labour-intensive services rises permanently whether or not they are well run. Social care, teaching, nursing, safeguarding and casework all work this way, and a social worker's assessment does not get twice as fast by doubling the caseload, it gets worse.
Two things follow from that. No amount of good management removes the structural pressure, and most of the financial pressure councils and trusts are under is not evidence of their own failure.
The practical consequence is that efficiency programmes built on the assumption that somebody is simply doing it wrong will keep disappointing, and the more useful question is not how to cut waste but what could be done differently that changes the shape of the demand.
Technology is part of the answer
Technology, and especially AI, is a solution to the challenge identified by Baumol, but achieving the benefits can be a challenge.
Erik Brynjolfsson's work on the productivity J-curve explains why. When an organisation adopts a new technology, measured productivity usually falls before it rises, because the system has been bought but the processes, skills, structures and decision rights around it have not yet been rebuilt. That rebuilding is the expensive part, can take years and requires changes in behaviours and culture.
Organisations that do the rebuilding eventually see the return, and organisations that buy the system and leave the operating model alone end up automating the process they already had, at which point the benefits case often fails. This is the most common pattern I see in public sector technology programmes, and the usual conclusion is to blame the technology supplier for failing to deliver.
The practical consequence is that the binding constraint on AI and digital adoption is organisational absorption rather than technical capability, and buying more technology against an unchanged organisation adds cost without adding output.
We must focus on the needs of individuals and our communities
Professor Andrew Gray's typology describes how public services hold three quite different relationships with the people who use them and they often hold all three at the same time.
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Citizens, where the relationship is governed by rights, equity and standards and everybody is entitled to the same thing
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Clients, where need is professionally adjudicated and a social worker or clinician decides with the person what is required
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Customers, where there is a choice, a specification and usually a price
Private sector productivity thinking is built almost entirely on the third relationship and it does real damage when it is applied to the first two. A throughput target in a citizen relationship erodes equity, and a choice mechanism in a client relationship can move risk to a vulnerable person.
The practical consequence is that productivity measures have to be chosen relationship by relationship, because a measure that is right for waste collection is wrong for child protection and installing it there will produce better numbers and worse outcomes.
This is also why consultants who are genuinely good in other sectors often struggle to deliver in local public services. The instincts that serve them in a customer relationship misfire in the other two and they do not always notice that it has happened.
Working together to improve outcomes
The scarcest resource may not be money or technology, but the organisation's own ability to absorb change and to hold it in place over the years it takes to pay back investment in transformation.
That puts a great responsibility on the teams doing the change work, both the internal transformation teams and the consultancies working alongside them.
Our focus is how to equip those transformation teams to maximise their impact in improving local public services.