A NEW report from Theos risks the “heresy” of questioning the importance of productivity, its authors say.
More: The problem with productivity, published last week, identifies a have to “interrogate the assumptions that every one too often lie unexamined beneath the discussion of productivity. In effect, we should be asking the query ‘productivity of what?’ In particular, when eager about those activities through which the private element is intrinsic to the exchange, we must ask whether any ostensible gain in productivity risks undermining the true, underlying good we must always be in search of.”
Against a backdrop of calls across the political spectrum to tackle the UK’s sluggish productivity, the report acknowledges that “it’s harder to enhance living standards without economic growth, and it is tough to grow the economy as a complete without improving our collective productivity”.
It says that increasing productivity throughout the past century led to “a rapid improvement in living standards, higher healthcare, and improved life expectancy”. The country’s newer performance is “weak”, it says. Since 2008, productivity has “almost stalled, growing at a much slower rate than its comparators”. A scarcity of private-sector investment, lower levels of technical training, and “a lesser culture of innovation” are possible causes it cites.
But it warns that, in becoming the topic of “a near obsessive focus of economic policy”, productivity has escaped scrutiny. Productivity is “so obviously, so self-evidently necessary and vital, that we omit to ask why or, more heretically, whether that’s the case”.
The report goes on to warn that, in our attempts to enhance productivity, “we is perhaps at risk of severing the correlation between productivity and human wellbeing that ultimately makes productivity growth something price pursuing”.
Surveying a landscape through which 84 per cent of the workforce is employed within the “service sector” — a realm through which productivity gains are likely harder to realize and through which “human interactions are central to our exchanges” — it argues that “an unqualified emphasis on improving productivity can result in undermining the very kinds of non-public connections that make us human.”
It is these “personal goods”, akin to interest, inspiration, encouragement, attention, sympathy, and patience, evident in services akin to social care, which might be “most vulnerable to being lost when the push for improved productivity enters into the conversation”, it says (Comment, 30 August). It gives the instance of a GP being encouraged to scale back the length of appointments in order that the next variety of patients could be seen.
“A fantastic many activities are intrinsically personal, the great of non-public contact being necessary and sometimes even essential to them,” it concludes. “That personal connection shouldn’t be amenable to productivity improvements, no less than not without betraying itself.”
Productivity was a big theme of Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS, published last week. It identifies a “desperate shortage of capital”, “crumbling buildings”, and “the dire state of social care” as key causes of low productivity within the NHS, where the variety of appointments, operations, and procedures had not kept pace with increases in staff numbers.
“Instead of putting their time and skills into achieving higher outcomes, clinicians’ efforts are wasted on solving process problems, akin to ringing around wards desperately trying to search out available beds,” he writes. Hospitals needed to bring down waiting lists through “higher operational management, capital investment in modern buildings and equipment, and re-engaging and empowering staff”. The NHS stays “within the foothills of digital transformation”, and wishes a “major tilt towards technology”.
