The only way to achieve excellence among public sector workers is through “some real discipline and some fear”, the coalition government’s policy minister Oliver Letwin has said.
According to the Guardian, Letwin, who is the coalition’s architect of public sector reforms, told attendees at the launch of a liberal think tank’s report at the London headquarters of management consultancy KPMG, that the public sector had atrophied over the last two decades.
But he added: “You can’t have room for innovation and the pressure for excellence without having some real discipline and some fear on the part of the providers that things may go wrong if they don’t live up to the aims that society as a whole is demanding of them.”
Diversity of service provision would result in some good providers and some bad, but the latter would not “attract the patient or the pupil, for example” and would also fail to get results, leading to them not being paid.
This meant that some providers would not survive, which was an “inevitable and intended consequence” of government policy, Letwin said.
But Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, reacted angrily to the comments, branding them as “nonsense”.
“Public sector workers are already working in fear – fear of cuts to their job, pension, living standards and of privatisation. Far from improving productivity, the cuts are creating chaos in vital public services,” he said.
Figures from the Office of National Statistics indicated that productivity in public services feel on average by 0.3% per year between 1997 and 2008 because the level of inputs such as staff and equipment increased more quickly than outputs such as operations performed or the numbers of pupils taught.
