National Statistician’s foreword
I am delighted to publish this report today, summarising the significant work the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has undertaken over the last 18 months to review and improve the measurement of public service productivity in the UK.
In 2023 the then Chancellor of the Exchequer commissioned me to undertake this Review. Since then, the productivity of our public services continues to be under scrutiny, particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Having good quality data is more important than ever to provide insight and support government decision making in this area.
Measuring public service productivity has historically been recognised as a challenging area. In the UK, around 20% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is accounted for by the outputs of public services, comparable to most other western economies. The last significant review of how to measure this substantial section of the economy was carried out in 2005 (Atkinson Review Final report). The ONS responded to this with implementation of recommended methods for the largest services, particularly Healthcare and Education and led in this field of statistics internationally. Following the Bean Review in 2016, work in this area was rejuvenated and further new methods were developed for Children’s Social Care, Criminal Justice and Adult Social Care, but that still left numerous other services with methods which have benefitted from this Review.
During this Review we have revisited the ‘Atkinson Principles’, considered new methods and sought previously untapped data sources to enable introduction of productivity estimates for public services not measured up until now, as well as improving our existing ones. Today’s report outlines improvements we have already made over the last 18 months and those being incorporated in our next statistical publication this Spring. We have also improved the timeliness of provision of data and made recommendations for improving the coherence of our productivity estimates.
To complement the development of our measures of public service productivity, we have conducted groundbreaking survey work on how public sector workers spend their time, and management practices in the public sector, enabling us to make comparisons between the private and public sectors for the first time and understand key drivers of the trends our statistics reveal. Furthermore, we conducted new qualitative research to better understand the lived experiences and views of public sector workers around the factors impacting their productivity and where innovation could improve it.
These analyses have provided new insight on the drivers of productivity in the public sector, and opportunities and barriers to increasing automation, for example through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Future adoption of these data collections as repeat surveys would add to the evidence base on which policy and spending decisions are made.
We have also looked ahead strategically to how our improvements should be incorporated into the compilation of GDP and the UK National Accounts, in the context of the anticipated publication of the new System of National Accounts 2025 classification and its subsequent implementation.
Beyond this Review we plan continuous improvement of our measurement of public service productivity where, despite the significant progress we have made, there remains more that can be done. The report makes a number of recommendations for the future.
I want to give my thanks to colleagues across the UK Government, in the devolved governments, and partners in various organisations and wider academia who have worked with us, and without whom we could not have delivered this Review.