The decision by Equiniti to take control of MyCSP, which was spun out of the Cabinet Office in 2011 to run civil service pensions, confirms what has been pretty obvious for a while.
Calling MyCSP a “mutual enterprise” was a ruse. There’s no halfway house between outsourcing and privatisation on the one hand and maintaining public provision of public services on the other.
It is not an accident that this move comes just after the Tory conference and the party’s turn to the right. Big Society died a while ago and the world of public services is binary. Community-run libraries and the rest aren’t happening; volunteers aren’t running to staff the fire service pumps. Unless public services are cut altogether, in future they will either be provided in-house or on contract, and most contracting will be by profit-making private companies.
But the shape of the future for public services is a little easier to discern after the past fortnight of party politicking. OK, conference season isn’t over and the Liberal Democrats have yet to come, but the indistinct nature of their policies and their probable election losses mean they can pretty much be discounted in assessing what lies ahead for public managers and their staff.
For that picture, should we, like a Supremacist artist, just fling a pot of black paint at the canvas? It’s not as bad as that.
Take health. NHS total employment has been rising. Despite the huge financial gap between budgets and demand, the future for most existing staff looks reasonably secure though. David Cameron’s spending pledge is imprecise but sounds like some sort of guarantee of employment, although staff may have to move around a bit, as they have during the unprecedented disruption caused by the 2012 Act.
It’s hard to get a grip on employment in education because academy schools and further education colleges have been radically re-classified; for statistical purposes, both are now in the private sector. But even allowing for deterioration in pupil-teacher ratios, it looks like total jobs in schools, including those of teachers, have been increasing. Neither the Labour nor the Tory conference made particular commitments on education funding but it’s a reasonable assumption that the semi-protected position of schools would continue.
Over the next five years, the pain will be concentrated where it has been for the past five: local authorities,the civil service and the police. Budget projections by shire counties, city councils and London boroughs point to large-scale redundancies over the next few years. Civil servants have heard ministers making ominous promises about efficiency savings in public administration, which can only mean cuts in headcount. What justice minister Chris Grayling is doing to probation may be the template for what a reinvigorated Cameron second-term government would do in other service areas – prisons, policing, benefits administration, even parts of HMRC.
Strictly speaking, existing public sector staff would not necessarily be unemployed. They might be TUPE’d into roles with private contractors, but past experience shows they would face not only disruption but reduced pension entitlement and cuts to pay and conditions – because without those changes, contracting is no cheaper.
Labour’s thinking about the civil service and public service management is opaque, to say the least. By inference from its tax and spend commitments, life outside health and schools would be pretty gloomy. Even if a government led by Ed Miliband were less enthusiastic about outsourcing than Labour last time around, the sums aren’t going to add up unless it bears down as fiercely on costs, including pay and pensions.
At a fifth of total employment, the public sector is already a smaller presence than at any time since the early 1960s. But the public sector still provides well over 5m jobs, give or take the staff of the “nationalised” banks. Even the gloom-mongers of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Office for Budget Responsibility, who have every right to be gloomy, have not – yet – revised upwards their prediction of public sector staff figures falling to about 4.5m by the end of the next parliament.
All that must mean, for all the political and fiscal turbulence, steady employment for the majority of today’s public servants.
David Walker is contributing editor to the Guardian Public Leaders Network
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