Public opinion: Your blogs

In praise of inefficiency - a response to Gordon Brown

Today the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, is announcing his spending strategy in the pre-budget report. Gordon Brown has already trailed the big theme: efficiency.

The prime minister will personally oversee (at least as long as he's in office) a Cabinet sub-committee on efficiency and value for money. He will halve Whitehall spending on consultancy and slash marketing budgets by 25%. He will save £500m by merging or abolishing 123 quangos.

All very impressive and macho. And for the last few years, ministers have been scurrying around the country setting up new bodies, closing down others, moving civil servants from one place to another under the gaze of the great god Gershon, all in the name of efficiency.

Efficiency is an easy win for governments, because you can always announce more of it and then blame the minions in the civil service or local government if they don't deliver. But this is the galley-slave mentality: the idea that if you work people harder and shout at them louder you'll get better results and will need fewer of them.

Someone needs the courage to tell Gordon Brown (and David Cameron, who's signed up to the same competition) that you don't improve public services by setting arbitrary targets for efficiency. Abolishing organisations and setting up new ones is fundamentally inefficient: you have to decide which bits of work were worth doing, how they'll be done in future, how you'll structure the roles of the staff doing the reorganised work, and how you'll deal with the consequences of not doing the work ministers once thought was worthwhile but have now decided to dump.

Similarly, much as people like to knock consultants, presumably they've been employed for a purpose, and because the capacity or skill to do the work in-house is missing. So who's going to pick up the work that's currently being outsourced (no doubt in the name of efficiency)? Or will we magically create efficiency by not doing the work at all?

Maybe we need to stop talking about efficiency and start thinking about effectiveness. We want the money spent on public services to achieve the results citizens are looking for. Rob Greenland has posted some interesting thoughts about failure demand - the demand for public services generated by mistakes. Effective services think about the needs of the customer or citizen and do their best to meet them with the resources available; services designed to produce the cheapest possible results in the name of efficiency may well increase the degree of failure demand.

And - shocking as it may seem to efficiency-obsessed ministers - we do need to think about the quality of life of those actually doing the work. The idea that people work better when they're under the whip may succeed in a Stalinist society but in an economy where people are mobile it demoralises. Productivity becomes the value of old-fashioned production lines: keep everything moving and never mind the quality. It's the mentality that gave us the Austin Allegro.

Surprising as it may seem, people appear to work better when they don't have to deliver an output for every moment spent in the office. When they engage in conversation they pick up ideas; when they get out of the office they get new perspectives on life and work. Creative, worthwhile work needs stimulation, exchange, interaction and challenge, and the unpredictability of not knowing exactly what will emerge.

I'm on the board of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, which is part think tank, part consultancy. Commercial realities concentrate every consultant's mind. But CLES doesn't think of every moment as billable time, even though this would be more 'efficient'. Their philosophy is that 'any project work needs to be fun, interesting, and/or potentially able to gain a surplus'. I think that's the right way round - and it hasn't harmed their balance sheet. The value to the organisation and its clients comes from being able to think creatively. More creative inefficiency in the public sector might actually give us more effective services.