Friday 5 July 2013

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last blogged so my apologies for that. The diet and guitar lessons are going well so I’m looking forward to the heat wave we have predicted over the next week or so. I’ve even built a new BBQ...

Last week saw the chancellor publish his spending review for government, including the reductions agreed for local government. In a nut shell we will have 10% less funding each year over the next four years of the business plan period. This is in line with our predictions and modelling so no real surprises which is good. It gives us a challenge though – to identify and save around £30m per year in each of the next four years (£120m in total).

The part of the chancellors statement that intrigued me was his insistence that public sector workers should be paid placed on performance related pay (PRP schemes). This happens in some private and public sector organisations. As somebody who was on a pay for performance scheme in the private sector, and who’s researched the case for and against widely I have concluded that they just don’t work.

Some people and organisations site the evidence, but there isn’t any. The number of organisations using PRP does not constitute evidence that it actually works, but this is a lazy argumment. PRP is based on an assumption that people need to be bribed to perform to their best. Well I’ve never come across people in either the private or public sectors that this applies to. Staff genuinely want to do a good job. The systems they work in then contrive to stop this. As does poor management. These are the problem that need addressing and you can’t solve either with PRP. Alfie Kohn in his book, Punished by Reward makes the case beautifully, and with real evidence that they don’t work. The clincher for me was discovering that the evidence for PRB was based on experiments with rats conducted in the 1950s and 1960s. I don’t accept that experiments on rats 60 years ago should form the basis for work based people policy for the 21st century. But maybe that’s just me.

And this leads me to conclude that much social and political policy right now is poorly thought out and based on ideology rather than sound evidence. This is what I mean when I observe that the biggest problem we face now as a country and the public sector is not budget reductions – savings £30m per year is not that difficult – but it is around thinking and behaving differently. The shoddy thinking that promotes PRP will also stop us innovating and exploring new and more effective ways of delivering the public services which communities need. Thinking differently is the biggest challenge that we now face.

For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Thanks for reading and talk again in a few days.

Carlton