When you ask people why they choose to work in public services, you most often hear about wanting to “make a difference” to others’ lives. One respondent to a straw poll spoke of feeling a need to “cleanse my soul” after several years in the financial sector.
Such comments go to the heart of the so-called public service ethos. But with a rapidly shrinking public sector, an unprecedented squeeze on rewards for public servants, and a culture in awe of swashbuckling free enterprise – The Apprentice is, after all, one of our most popular television programmes – who would today choose a career in furtherance of the common good?
The answer, hearteningly, is that many of us would – and do. Just look at how many of the best and brightest young people are clamouring for places on TeachFirst and Frontline, the schemes to attract high-flying graduates into schools and social work respectively. There were more than 25 applicants for every place in the first Frontline cohort this year, and although TeachFirst was designed as a two-year scheme, with trainees then free to go on to other careers, four in 10 remain in teaching after five years’ experience.
So the public service ethos is alive and well; what has changed is the nature of public service. Increasingly, it is something delivered not by traditional public sector agencies, but by organisations in the private and voluntary sectors and – as state funding diminishes – by communities themselves.
Latest figures show that the number of UK workers officially classified as public sector has fallen to 5.4 million, the lowest total since the count began in 1999. About one million have fallen out of the sector since 2009. Fewer than one in five workers are now considered to be in the sector, although the proportion ranges from 16.2% in the south-east to 27.6% in Northern Ireland. The figures no longer include employees of the privatised Royal Mail, which most people would still consider a public service, but do include employees of RBS and Lloyds banks in which the state currently holds a controlling interest.
Like the post, many public services now sit outside the public sector. The biggest is surely social care, which employs an estimated 1.6 million people in England alone but is delivered almost entirely by private or voluntary organisations.
It would be difficult to argue that a care assistant working in a charity-run residential home is any less of a public servant than an NHS nurse, or that a refuse collector was no longer a public servant because the service had been outsourced to a contractor. Estimates suggest that public services work worth a total £51bn has been outsourced over the past two years, doubling the total value of contracts since 2010, and this trend will only continue to grow with the prospect of four more years of austerity.
Yet wherever public servants hang their hats, the job they do remains often uniquely challenging and breeds qualities that make them highly marketable.
Alexander Stevenson, author of The Public Sector: managing the unmanageable, reckons that managing in public services makes you skilled in the art of persuasion, dealing with complex decisions and, by no means least, managing crises. “Under pressure, public sector managers are likely to be good at prioritising, making sensible decisions and communicating effectively,” he says. Quoting Tory peer and publishing magnate Michael Heseltine, he adds: “Public sector decision-making is infinitely more complex than private sector decision-making.”
That’s all very well, but do the rewards recognise such skill and responsibility? Isn’t it a fact that pay in public services lags well behind that in the private sector?
It’s true that public sector pay has been held back since 2010 and that people at senior levels are generally better remunerated in the private sector. There has been crude pressure over the past two years to ensure that no public servant earns more than the prime minister’s £142,500 salary. But as the latest analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) shows, overall pay levels are broadly equivalent across the sectors and the defined benefit pension still available to most public sector workers remains a considerable plus. That’s well worth thinking about.
David Brindle is the Guardian’s public services editor
Read more
• New series: careers in public services
• Why there won’t be mass redundancies in the public sector after the election
This article is part of our series on careers in public services. Click here to read more in the series.
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