The Institute of Fiscal Studies has commissioned Sir Angus Deaton to lead a review of growing inequality in the UK https://www.ifs.org.uk/inequality/

The press have got very excited about this, and rightly so – what could be more exciting than a 2 year study mixing economics with epidemiology?

Just think of the graphs!

https://news.sky.com/story/suicide-drug-abuse-and-alcoholism-linked-to-more-middle-aged-deaths-than-heart-disease-11719426

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2019/may/14/britain-risks-heading-to-us-levels-of-inequality-warns-top-economist?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

For those who don’t remember Sir Angus Deaton he isn’t the former presenter of HIGNFY, but the Nobel Prize winning economist who often works with his wife Prof Ann Case. Their work spans the fields of Economics and Epimedieology.

I’ve written about his work on life expectancy in the USA before:

https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/jon-chadwick.com/468

https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/jon-chadwick.com/513

The scope of the IFS Review is very broad:

“To give a sense of the breadth and ambition of the project, the themes to be covered here will include: which inequalities matter and why they matter; people’s attitudes towards inequality; their experiences of inequality; the political economy of inequality; the history of inequality; trends in economic inequalities; intergenerational inequalities; health inequalities; geographical inequalities; gender; race and ethnicity; immigration; early child development; education systems; families; social mobility; trade and globalisation; productivity, growth and innovation; labour markets; tax policy; and welfare policy” https://www.ifs.org.uk/inequality/about-the-review/our-approach/

This seems like a good moment to revisit 2 ideas that the review will look at – the geography of inequality and differences in life expectancy.

There is a new iteration of the Regional GDP/GVA dataset which shows how wealth is changing across different parts of the UK

These are the latest numbers for 2017 and growth is slow across most of the UK, with the exception of London. Even the South East show less than 2% growth.

This is just follows a longer term trend since the credit crunch:

London and the South East were growing faster than the rest of the UK before the credit crunch, and London has definitely grown faster since, but it is the dreadful rates of growth in places like the North East and Yorkshire and Humber that stand out. In these places the economy is stagnating significantly.

We can look at some other factors – growth since the EU referendum:

This is just a straight forward comparison of the 2 years before the referendum with the 2 years afterwards. London is actually growing faster than it was thanks to all of that QE. The economic slow down since the referendum is hitting the places that were hit hardest after the credit crunch and making regional differences worse.

GVA as a concept is similar to GDP, however it excludes the redistributive effects of tax and benefits. It show the impact of production and wealth creation, which is very similar to GDP but not exactly the same. These are chained value series which adjust for inflation.

To get an idea of how much these 2 numbers differ we can compare these 2 graphs from the IFS report:

This is a graph showing the top 1% of richest people in the UK’s share of national income:

It looks like the rich are getting richer regardless of how the economy grows. This picture, however, changes hugely when you factor in the impact of tax and benefits on incomes:

This shows an incredibly egalitarian picture (although I think the IFS have excluded the outliers of rich and poor to create this graph). Government policies such as Tax Credits have had a very significant redistributive impact.

Truly this is a triumph for socialism.

This starts to explain why the Cameron government found it so hard to cut spending. As they reduced overall Government spending the economy slowed down, particularly in places like the North East. As the economy slowed spending on benefits went up, wiping out most if not all of the cuts in Government spending. Cameron and Osborne tried to cut benefits payments, but only really succeeded in increasing poverty while still missing their fiscal targets.

https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/jon-chadwick.com/972

We can start and look at the areas in the UK with the lowest GVA/GDP per capita:

And the highest

The slowest growing:

And the fastest growing:

The big differences leap out between urban and rural, fast growing and slow growing, old industry and new industry.

We can compare this data with life expectancy. In this case I have used life expectancy aged 65. These are the places with the shortest life expectancy for woman:

A much more familiar list of mostly urban areas

And the same data for men:

You might have spotted the far right hand column which shows the change between 14-16 and 15-17. Some parts of the UK are starting to experience a fall in life expectancy:

At Ag65
Name	Sex	2014-2016	2015-2017	Change
Orkney Islands	Female	21.1	20.1	-1.0
Hart	Female	23.0	22.5	-0.6
Lincoln	Females	20.2	19.7	-0.5
Boston	Females	20.6	20.1	-0.5
Ryedale	Females	22.6	22.1	-0.5
North East Derbyshire	Females	20.8	20.3	-0.5
Lewes	Females	23.1	22.7	-0.4
Hinckley and Bosworth	Females	22.1	21.6	-0.4
Brighton and Hove	Females	21.3	20.9	-0.4
Southend-on-Sea	Females	21.0	20.6	-0.4
Telford and Wrekin	Females	20.3	19.9	-0.4
Clackmannanshire	Females	19.3	19.0	-0.4
North Kesteven	Females	21.8	21.4	-0.4
Plymouth	Females	20.8	20.4	-0.4
Norwich	Females	21.9	21.5	-0.4
Corby	Females	19.9	19.5	-0.4
Pendle	Females	20.2	19.8	-0.4
Stoke-on-Trent	Females	19.8	19.5	-0.4
Christchurch	Females	22.9	22.5	-0.4
King’s Lynn and West Norfolk	Females	21.9	21.6	-0.4
Crawley	Females	22.0	21.6	-0.3
Wycombe	Females	21.6	21.2	-0.3
Runnymede	Females	21.8	21.5	-0.3
Wellingborough	Females	20.8	20.5	-0.3
Shropshire	Females	21.6	21.2	-0.3
Worcester	Females	21.8	21.5	-0.3
Mansfield	Females	19.9	19.6	-0.3
Hounslow	Females	21.9	21.5	-0.3
Isle of Wight	Females	21.7	21.4	-0.3
Camden	Females	24.4	24.1	-0.3
Rushmoor	Females	20.8	20.5	-0.3
Dover	Females	20.9	20.6	-0.3
South Northamptonshire	Females	22.3	22.0	-0.3
Swindon	Females	21.0	20.8	-0.3
Tendring	Females	20.9	20.6	-0.3
Chichester	Females	22.3	22.1	-0.3
Chesterfield	Females	20.4	20.1	-0.3
Conwy	Females	21.7	21.4	-0.3
East Lothian	Females	20.7	20.4	-0.3
Hambleton	Females	22.7	22.4	-0.3
Gedling	Females	21.0	20.7	-0.3
Mid Suffolk	Females	22.5	22.2	-0.3
Reading	Females	21.2	20.9	-0.3
Islington	Females	21.3	21.0	-0.3
Dundee City	Females	19.3	19.0	-0.3
Chelmsford	Females	21.9	21.6	-0.3
Bury	Females	19.9	19.7	-0.3
Scarborough	Females	21.2	21.0	-0.3
Eden	Females	22.9	22.7	-0.3
East Renfrewshire	Females	21.4	21.1	-0.3
Southampton	Females	20.8	20.6	-0.3
Purbeck	Females	22.7	22.5	-0.3

Sorry the table formatting is a bit wonky, there were so many places I wanted to highlight with falling female life expectancy that it was hard to cram them all in

This is the same data for men:

We might as well see the areas with the fastest growing life expectancy:

And men:

What this shows us is that the intersection of wealth and life expectancy is complex. It is easy to spot areas with low GVA which are low because of a lot of retired people. It is also easier to spot areas which have a fast increasing male life expectancy because they are former industrial areas which start from a very poor baseline.

But the list of areas with significantly declining life expectancy includes some very affluent areas like St Albans, which would suggest that this isn’t just about poverty, but about life style too.

A cycnic would ask the obvious question? Do we really care about inequality?

I would rather live in a society where no-one is poor and no-one is hungry but someone has a gold hat, and a society where no-one has a gold hat, but some people are poor and hungry.

I was brought up with the view that socialist politics that are rooted in working class communities concern themselves with tackling poverty, while socialist politics rooted in middle class neurosis concerns itself with tackling inequality

But in this case we can look to the USA and see that the combination of economic decline and declining life expectancy in non-college graduate, non-hispanic white populations has reached shocking levels.

We can see in the data above that we are starting to develop the same patterns of inequality of income and life expectancy that the USA is, although in the UK the picture is more complex.

Maybe we should get ready for the rise of a UK Trump articulating the grievances of non-college graduate white UK voters?

Sources:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossvalueaddedgva/bulletins/regionalgrossvalueaddedbalanceduk/1998to2017

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/bulletins/healthstatelifeexpectanciesuk/2015to2017

https://www.bma.org.uk/-/media/files/pdfs/about%20the%20bma/how%20we%20work/divisions/pre%20arm%20briefings/2%20pre%20arm%20briefing%20-%20life%20expectancy.pdf?la=en

file:///Users/jonchadwick/Downloads/2%20Pre%20ARM%20briefing%20-%20Life%20Expectancy.pdf

Croydon Health Services NHS is about to advertise for a new Chief Executive.

This isn’t unusual. It’s been a troubled Trust on and off for a while, formed from the merger of Mayday Healthcare NHS Trust with Croydon Community Health Services. It operates University Hospital Croydon along with lots of Community Services, and a Community Hospital.

The Trust has the second worst accident and emergency performance in London, it sees just 60 per cent of type-one patients within four hours, compared to the 95 per cent target. Both the Trust and the Clinical Commissioning Group have been in special measures over the last few years due to endemic financial problems.

What is unusual is that it is a joint appointment with the Clinical Commissioning Group. Which means that the CEO will have responsibility for the purchaser and provider bit of local health services. The 2 organisations already share a Chief Nurse and a Chief Pharmacist.

This is a quietly radical proposal which undermines the fundamental principles of the NHS internal market – the purchaser/provider split.

It also pretty clearly illustrates one of the attractions of getting rid of the internal market – you need a lot fewer senior managers.

I can’t help but note that if you took University Hospital Croydon out of the equation the rest of the role is:

Commissioner CEO + Community Hospitals + Community Services + Minor Injuries + Intermediate Care = my old job.

How much of this is Matt Hancock (Secretary of State for Health and Parkour Champion), and how much is Simon Stephens (NHS England CEO) is unsure – my guess is it Stephen not Matt.

Next time someone tells you that the NHS is being privatised by stealth, feel free to tell them they are wrong. There is a quiet and stealthy dismantling of the mechanisms of the internal market taking place, unpicking one of the final parts of Thatcher’s legacy. This is a dry run for the full scale repeal of the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

And this is the Secretary of State for Health demonstrating Parkour:

The public sector outsourcing market died another death this week with the news that the UK’s Probation Services (or Offender Management as they are now called by wacky bureaucrats) will all come back in house:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/16/part-privatisation-probation-sevices-to-be-reversed-offender-management-nationalised-chris-grayling

This isn’t entirely news as the problems with Criminal Justice outsourcing have been know about for several years:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/15/probation-reforms-put-public-at-higher-risk

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/03/chris-grayling-probation-changes-took-unacceptable-risks-with-public-money

On this occassion I make no apologies for quoting exclsively from the Guardian. It isn’t the great paper it once was, but it is still the best UK news source for public policy, particularly social policy. I’ve also covered the crisis in the UK public sector outsourcing industry for several years:

https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/jon-chadwick.com/1138

https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/jon-chadwick.com/1119

https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/jon-chadwick.com/946

If you don’t want to read all of those links I can summarise for you:

Outsourcing Criminal Justice is an inherently stupid idea.

Outsourcing works well when you an transfer risk to the contractor in return for which they make profit, and where you can specify the outcomes you want without creating perverse incentives. You simply can’t do this with criminal justice in the way you can with processing applications, or dealing with telephone queries.

The Tories right now are doing a much better job of dismantling the UK outsourcing market than the Labour Party are, despite the launch this week of another set of jumbled proposals for the re-nationalisation of utilities.

https://www.ft.com/content/7db291fe-7665-11e9-bbad-7c18c0ea0201

I am pretty happy with the transfer of the utilities back into public ownership, along with big chunks of the Railways, with the proviso that I don’t like “all-in” or “all-out” models, I like a mixed economy with public and private competing, but with HMG maintain a market making stake.

I realise that I am conflating outsourcing with privatisation, but in this case the decisions to outsource/privatise vs in-house/nationalise are based on competing ideological views not on a well thought out set of ideas about the best way to deliver public services.

There are some really big things that Labour need to avoid when designing re-nationalisation proposals:

1. Don’t use “leveraged buyout” style deals that load debt onto the newly re-nationalised industry. This will prevent them from future borrowing to fund capital investment (the lack of capital investment was always the problem historically with nationalised industries)
2. Don’t try to hide the cost of these re-nationalisations using off balance sheet transactions. The public need to know clearly the cost of the re-nationalisations so they can judge if they are value for money
3. Don’t recompense the former owners with Bonds that pay out an income. This is basically all of the problems of PFI without actually creating new assets

Labour’s original proposals had all of these problems:

A hopeless jumble.

It looks like the lateset set of proposals are a step forward, in that they are on balance sheet transactions, but still involve PFI style bonds, and still load debt onto the nationalised industry which will limit future investment.

The scale of the debt loaded onto the books of the newly nationalised will be reduced because Labour plan to pay less than the market value of the shares in the utilities to reflect investment, pensions deficits and historic profits. There is a precedent for that. In 2002 Railtrack got into financial difficulties and the Blair Government nationalised it, paying shareholders £2.50 a share – much less than the £9.50 that they claimed it was worth.

Railtrack haircut

The shareholders took the Government to court and the case dragged on for 4 years before the Government won.

The Utility companies are in much better shape than Railtrack was (it was insolvent and had £7bn in debts when the Government stepped in), and the fight from the Utilities is likely to be much stronger and a lot longer

Just as the Tories are killing off public sector outsourcing by putting ideological dogma above good policy making Labour are setting up re-nationalisation to fail by down exactly the same thing.

So far the Tories are making a great case for Nationalisation while Labour are making a great case for Privatisation. It’s almost as if they are both utterly and totally incompetent.

One of the greatest ever papers published in a history journal was written by Jan Vansina for the Journal of African History

Vansina makes the very simple argument that the abolition of slavery increased labour costs. These increased labour costs in turn made it more attractive to invest in mechanisation and industrialisation. And the increased investment in mechanisation and industrialisation created faster economic growth.

The countries who abolished slavery earliest, including the UK, had the fastest economic growth over the C19th. The countries who abolished slavery last, such as Portugal (and those whose economies were the most reliant on slavery), had the slowest economic growth.

I always thought Vansina’s argument was a bit limited – slavery wasn’t really a feature of the economy of the British Isles, it was mainly confined to the Colonies in the Americas, while the investment in mechanisation and industrialisation was in the domestic economy not in the colonies.

But despite these limitations I still love Vansina’s thesis – it is elegant and illuminating

And Vansina’s argument does work. It even works if you apply it more broadly across the Americas: The Northern States which didn’t have slavery were more industrialised and had faster growing economies than the Southern States (this is one of the reasons why they won the Civil War). The USA was less reliant on slavery and faster industrialisation and growth than the South American states who had a greater reliance on slavery and plantation agriculture in general.

The reason why I went back to Vansina is because of a fantastic row which is taking place in the Economic History Review about the extent to which high wages in C17th and C18th England drove increased mechanisation and industrialisation. The debate is largely around whether Britain had higher wage costs than competitors like France. This is the hottest debate I can ever recall in an academic field that is dominated by graphs and tables.

Instinctually I believe the high wage argument. In the centuries before industrialisation the rich and powerful had consolidated land ownership, building the familiar pattern of stately homes and large estates. This left a surplus rural population who were driven off the land, by force if necessary. In Scotland we call this Highland Clearances, in Ireland the Plantation System, and in England the Enclosure of the Common Land. These surplus populations were transported, willingly or unwillingly: The English as criminals to Australia, the Irish as bonded labourers to America, the Scots to Canada.

The combination of an artificially restricted Labour Market and the suppression of the Slave Trade following the Somerset Judgement pushed up wages, in particular for skilled workers in the emerging urban areas. (I’m going to do a short follow up piece on Somerset v Stewart 98 ER 499)

My family were some of the people who benefited from this. They were weavers and textiles workers in Prestwich, then a village on the outskirts of Manchester, and they became more prosperous, some ending up as landlords and mill owners.

I think that there is a bit more behind the industrialisation of the UK, in particular the availability of capital. British capitalists had access to more capital than their competitors because they systematically took the capital of other countries to invest at home, in particular India. We weren’t the only country to expropriate other countries wealth, but we used that wealth to industrialise the nation rather than make gold statues for the Pope.

But above all it was the mix of the 2: high labour costs and easy availability of capital which encouraged mass industrialisation, which came to define the UK in the C18th and C19th.

Why is this important?

Very quietly the Government has been meeting with the TUC on a plan to increase the National Minimum Wage to £9.61, the highest in the world, and a massive step towards tackling in-work poverty. They are in competition with the Labour Party whose last manifesto included an commitment to a £10 an hour NMW. This is over and above the Government’s commitment to a National Living Wage.

For those interested in policy detail the NLW is defined a 60% of median earnings, and the NWW rates both the Government and Opposition are suggesting would represent over 66% of median earnings, which would push the NMW just above the OECD definition of low pay.

The National Minimum Wage has been such a huge success, so much so that both political parties are fighting for their own version of a National Living Wage that would end low pay. I would rate the NMW as one of the greatest achievements of post war Socialism, and one of the most successful Government policies of my life time.

Despite this The Office of Budget Responsibility have estimated that even the Conservative Parties less ambitious target would cost 140,000 jobs.

This isn’t the first time that the OBR have forecast lob losses like this. The introduction of the more limited definition of the National Living Wage in 2015 was forecast to cost more the 40,000 jobs, and yet it is really hard to spot these job losses anywhere in the economy.

Measuring the rate of job losses due to increases in the NMW/NLW is tough for 2 reasons. Firstly because the unemployment statistics are pretty badly cooked these days, to disguise high levels of underemployment and poverty in the working population. Increasing the NMW to £10 an hour isn’t going to end in work poverty for people aren’t working enough hours to make a difference .

But secondly because employers have been shifting insecure low wages jobs to self-employed in order to avoid the NMW. Uber and Deliveroo have both recently lost court cases forcing them to recognise the employment rights of their workers, but bogus self employment is an increasing feature of the UK economy, albeit one slightly declining at the moment.

Despite my scepticism it is clear that something good is happening in the UK Labour Market, and employment is at high levels despite the Government fiddling the numbers. Treating workers well, giving them better pay and conditions encourages more people into the Labour force, which in turn gives more choice to employers. Businesses with a ready pool of motivated workers find it easier to expand and grow, and the economy grows with them.

Wage increases are still low, which has perturbed economists, and is linked to low levels of capital investment. If increased levels of wages lead to high levels of capital investment and higher economic growth then logically an economy like the UK with low wage growth should have low levels of capital investment and low growth. This would explain why low interest rates haven’t led to higher levels of investment or growth.

But there is one final factor in wage growth that struck me when looking at the proposed rises in the NMW/NWL. As the NMW gets higher it draws more and more workers in. And the workers who have a differential above the NMW are effected too.

A £9.60 NMW means that a quarter of the UK workforce will have their wages set by the Government. When you add to that more highly paid employees whose wages are set by the Government in the public sector we have reached a situation where HMG sets the wage rates for more than half of Britain’s workers, even allowing that some Public Sector workers will be on the NMW.

A generation ago this would have seemed like a crazy socialist scheme, and yet we have a supposedly right wing Tory Government endorsing a plan to have the Government set wages for most British workers. The National Minimum Wage really was one of the most transformative ideas in modern British politics.

We have a highly regulated labour market with the Government set the wages and conditions for the majority of workers and close to full employment. Truly this is a Socialist Utopia!

If the Government really wants to tackle low pay it doesn’t have to look very far for solutions. It can simply mandate changes to pay.

As a final comment we have been conditioned to believe that the right thing ethically and the right thing economically are always in conflict, and that Government attempts to deliver a fairer society always have negative economic consequences.

The OBR can be forgiven for making the assumption that fairer wages lead to job losses because the are obliged to use an macro-economic model given to them by George Osborne, someone who has only been out of power for a few years, and yet whose ideas already seem paloe-economic.

But when it comes to Labour markets treating people better, paying them more and giving them more rights in the workplace is a good way to create a more flexible workforce, which is good for businesses. Higher wages leads to a faster growing economy.

Maybe it’s time to think differently about how we make the arguments for progressive politicies?

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ehr.12850

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/05/hammond-increase-minimum-wage-low-pay

https://www.jstor.org/stable/179869?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Where can I find your latest forecasts?

https://obr.uk/economy_categories/national-minimum-wage-and-national-living-wage/

First of all an apology. There is a lot on at work, and a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes, and this has got in the way of blogging.

The data from the last set Social Attitudes Survey is out, and people aren’t happy with the NHS.

This might not come as a surprise to people because it is pretty well known that the last 8 years have been lean years for the NHS in terms of funding increases. In fact this has been the longest period of funding restraint in the Service’s history, so no surprise people aren’t happy

Lets have a look at a graph shall we?

• 

There is a really stark difference between the 2 halves of the graph. The left hand side reflects the Conservative administrations of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, the right hand side of the graph the New Labour years, then the Coalition, and, finally, the Cameron and May Conservative years. People are much happier on the right hand side of the graph.

The really good scores are from the era was when I was a senior NHS manager. Definitely not a co-incidence

There are three things that really jump out at me.

Firstly that while the Labour Party started spending serious amounts of money on the NHS from 2000 onwards (the publication of The New NHS: Modern and Dependable), the improvement in patient satisfaction is a few years later. Patient satisfaction is clearly a lagging indicator.

If you want to test that against against funding this is a neat graph from the Institute of Fiscal Studies which shows a similar pattern, although it covers a longer time period

Secondly satisfaction doesn’t correlate with the number of Doctors. Patients love Doctors, in fact they love all clinical staff, and I did wonder if there was a correlation between Doctors per head of Population and patient satisfaction (apologies to Nurses and AHPs for using Doctors/Population as a proxy for Clinical Staff)

• 

I’m a bit confounded by that graph which came from the BMJ, which shows that increasing Doctors numbers doesn’t seem to have any relationship with patient satisfaction.

Finally the numbers for the Coalition and the Conservatives are much better than I expected. Given the awful levels of funding increases we saw under Cameron and May I would have expected . People were happier with the NHS when Cameron and Osborne were putting in less than 2% per a year, than they were when Thatcher was putting in 2.5%.

There are 2 possible explanations for this.

One is that the big cash increases that came during the New Labour years uplifted the baseline level of satisfaction and it will take a long time for this to decline. The other is that the NHS has done something, probably during the Blair years, that made it more customer friendly. This seems unlikely, but I do think that the spending increases in the Blair years renewed Britains love affair with the NHS

Lots of my Clinical friends will of course want to ask the obvious question?

“Why does this matter”

And in one sense it doesn’t matter. No patients got better because of a good survey result, no lives got saved.

This is of course true, but it’s worth dodging back in time to the Blair Government’s decision to put a huge amount of extra cash into the NHS.

At the time the Government was worried that support for public services was in decline. People were getting a poor service from the NHS, from schools, from public services in general, and once Labour had been in power a couple of years it wasn’t tenable to keep blaming the Tories.

Labour were scared that public support for universal public services like the NHS was in such steep decline that it would threaten their existence. The great threat to the existence of the NHS isn’t privatisation (as many on social media claim) it is lack of public support.

Labour wanted universal public services, but also wanted to maintain public support for more money

The solution was more cash + more choice + higher levels of satisfaction.

This was the classic Blairite triangulation and it was applied across public services. Taxpayers were asked to put record amounts of cash into public services like the NHS, in return for which they were offered greater choice about how they accessed those services, including the opportunity to access private Hospitals paid for by the NHS. The end result was meant to be better results – better mortality and morbidity but also better satisfaction ratings.

The same troika applied to other public services like Education too.

That’s why this matters. Because looking at the right hand side of the graph May is pushing some decent sized increases of cash through the service over the next few years, not quite Blair levels, but well above the Thatcher/Major/Cameron settlements. A lot more than Corbyn offered too.

Getting this extra cash took years of fighting with Treasury, not just by Hunt, but by Simon Stevens and lots of other senior NHS managers.

I don’t know what promises were made to Treasury in order to get hold of the cash, but they are likely to be pretty strict.

At the same time performance targets have been suspended for A&E performance because overall performance has declined sharply. The 4hr wait target hasn’t been hit for a few years now.

More money + declining satisfaction + worse performance is a tough mix for the Service to handle. I am not sure that Matt Hancock is the kind of Consigliere that May needs to finesse this kind of funding and performance squeeze.

The NHS should have had an idea of what it had to achieve for the new money when the NHS Long Term plan was launched earlier this year, however the plan requires legislation, and more detail, and these are now logjammed by Brexit.

The Long Term Plan website is still describing the Plan as proposals, and there has been a subsequent Implementation document, which sets out further work that is needed. This is classed as an engagement document, which I think means that it is for consultation, but that DH reserve the right to ignore the results of the consultation if they don’t like it. This jumble is a big difference from the Publication of the NHS Plan in 2000

The whole thing looks like a political storm brewing for the Service, with more money, a lack of clear direction, worsening satisfaction, declining performance and an angry Treasury.

Hopefully back to more regular blogging soon!

https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/70-years-of-nhs-spending

http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-32/health.aspx

https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/budgets/gb2017/gb2017ch5.pdf

https://www.ohe.org/publications/ohe-guide-uk-health-and-health-care-statistics

https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2940

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/how-nhs-performing-december-2018

https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/

https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/nhs-legislation-engagement-document.pdf

People in the NHS continually complain about re-organisations. The endless churn and change of job titles, letterheads and lanyards.

The reason for this continual mess can be traced back to the original sin of NHS management – the introduction of the internal market – the purchaser/provider split in the 80s. Pretty much ever re-organisation since then has been trying to make sense of something that never made any sense in the first place.

Despite all of the memes you have read on social media about evil capitalists privatising the NHS the reality is the opposite. There is very little appetite for the private sector to get involved in the NHS. That’s because the NHS is complex with unpredictable patterns of patient flows, which makes it hard for private companies to make the stable predictable profits their share holders want.

This lack of enthusiasm meant that the incredibly expensive structures of the internal market are really just used to move money from one bit of the public sector to another at great expense.

The 2012 Health and Social Care Act, often known as the Lansley Act tried to address this by introducing the compulsory tendering of services to the private sector. This was supposed to increase private sector interest by allowing them to take over less volatile services.

I have a fundamental problem with this. I honestly don’t mind the private sector bidding to provide NHS services as long as they invest their own capital and take risk on that capital. That’s why it’s called capitalism

The Lansley Act allowed the private sector to take on services and make profit using the NHS’s own capital. This is fundamentally wrong. This isn’t capitalism, it is some kind of weird state corporatism of the kind we saw in the 1930s in Italy and Japan.

The private sector did indeed take on more work, but the costs of administering the tendering process, the costs of the bureaucracy and the consequent costs of legal challenge made the whole thing uneconomic. I could have told them that at the start.

The current Government has put more money into the NHS. Embarrassingly they are currently putting more in than Labour promised in their 2017 manifesto.

There is a bill being drafted to go to Parliament with the proposals for how the new money will be spent.

Sharp eyed readers of board papers will have spotted that NHS England had a board paper this week called “Building the case for primary legislative change” . I understand that these proposals have Ministerial and Select Committee support and are likely to go through.

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/02-MiCIE-28-02-2019-building-the-case-for-primary-legislative-change.pdf

The proposals in the paper go way beyond the long term plan and have some very radical proposals:

“We consider that it should be possible for NHS commissioners to arrange for NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts to provide services without necessarily having to advertise these services and seek expressions of interest from the wider market. We propose that the regulations made under section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 should be revoked and the powers in primary legislation under which they are made should be repealed”

“we also propose that arrangements between NHS
commissioners and NHS providers are removed from the scope of the
Public Contracts Regulations”

“We are proposing legislative changes that could nonetheless
help provide more flexibility in developing new payment models…. removing the current ability for providers to seek NHS Improvement’s agreement for unilateral local modifications to national tariff prices, so that the onus is on providers and commissioners to agree any local variations to national prices”

“Through the development of ICSs, commissioners and providers are increasingly coming together to plan services in a much more collaborative way. Some local health systems have expressed interest in going further and bringing some services together under the responsibility of a single provider organisation, supported by a single contract and a combined budget….. Where it is difficult for commissioners to identify an existing organisation that could take on responsibility for an integrated care provider contract, we propose the Secretary of State should be given clear powers to establish new NHS trusts for the purposes of providing integrated care. Taken together with the procurement changes we propose, this would support the expectation in the NHS Long Term Plan, and the Health and Social Care Select Committee’s recommendation, that the Integrated Care Provider (ICP) contract should be held by public statutory providers”

“We are therefore suggesting proposals to promote collaboration by removing the legal barriers that limit the ability of CCGs, local authorities and NHS England to work together and take decisions jointly.”

Apologies for the long quotes, but this is radical stuff. This not only takes a sledgehammer to the 2012 Act, it actually starts and unpicks bits of the internal market. There was a brief moment in 1997 when Labour under Frank Dobson proposed this, but this was shelved for being too radical.

I realise that there are some rather misguided concerns about Integrated Care Systems, not helped by hopeless on line campaigns and petitions, but they offer the most immediate prospect of local areas dismantling the entire internal market.

Quietly NHS England are proposing some radical ideas. Hot stuff. Or at least as hot as health policy ever gets

Yet another outsourcing company gets into trouble.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/16/unions-condemn-chris-grayling-disastrous-part-privatisation-of-probation-working-links

I don’t think that many people will be sad to see the back of Working Links as they lose their probation services contract.

It looks like they might not be the only ones to lose their contract in the weeks to come – of the 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies only 2 are achieving their contracted outcomes.

I’m not opposed to outsourcing of Government work like some people – using Government spending to boost the private sector and the overall economy is a sensible Keynesian idea, and there are plenty of bits of routine Government admin which could be done more cheaply using surplus capacity in the private sector.

But I do think that there are some parts of the Government which should never be outsourced. When considering whether something should be outsourced there are 4 key questions to ask:

1. Can you transfer delivery risk to the private company – if something goes wrong can you hold them to account for their performance and make them fix it? The failure of Group 4 to deliver their contracts for the 2012 Olympics are a good example of this – the risk stayed with the Government no matter what the contract said, and Army ended up doing the job instead
2. Can you commercialise the activity and turn it onto a contract with clear outcomes without creating perverse incentives?
3. Is there an existing market for this service? Are their commercial companies out there with expertise in this business area?
4. What are the commercial partners bringing to the deal? Capital? Investment? Expertise?
5. it is impossible to transfer delivery risk to the private company
6. It is impossible to commercialise the activity and create a contract for it without creating perverse incentives
7. There isn’t an existing market for these services, and potential contractors don’t have experience in this business area

Criminal justice is a terrible business area for Government outsourcing because it has all of these problems – the risk stays with HMG no matter what the contract says, the contracts create perverse incentives, the private sector has no experience in criminal justice, and they don’t bring anything meaningful to the deal.

But it is also a terrible area for outsourcing companies to get into because their investors want predictable stable returns which are impossible to deliver with a volatile and unpredictable client group.

I worked alongside charities who were bidding for these contracts a long time ago and the commercial terms they were being offered were heavily weighted towards achieving specified outcomes for the ex-offenders.

Failure to achieve these outcomes was existential – it would drive the charity out of business. But getting predictable outcomes from an unpredictable client group was nigh on impossible.

This meant that only businesses of a certain size and structure could win these contracts, and even then, as the collapse of Working Links shows, a small variance from expected outcomes made the contract commercially unviable. This was the heart of the problem with Working Links who look to have been manipulating their contract performance to keep afloat.

At the time I was concerned enough about MOJs contracting systems that I considered speaking to their auditors, butI was concerned that if I did so the charities who I was connected with risked being disadvantaged in future bidding rounds.

HMG have produced a new “playbook” for people making outsourcing decisions, which tries to encourage more rigorous modelling of how much a service should cost and then run pilots, suggests ways to allocate risk between government and suppliers, and assess the merits of delivering a service in-house compared to outsourcing. 

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/780361/20190220_OutsourcingPlaybook_6.5212.pdf

The problem is that the playbook doesn’t really address the central problems – some areas of Government business aren’t really suitable for outsourcing, and there is a massive lack of commercial expertise across the Senior Civil Service.

For MOJ there is no way of fixing this situation. No way of mending the problems, or sorting out the market failure.

Outsourcing criminal justice services doesn’t work, and the whole system should be brought back in house immediately.

The sad thing is that there are still some really good UK outscourcing companies who do better work for the clients and service users than their public sector equivalents. There is nothing special about being a civil servant that makes people good at dealing with people or managing complex business processed.

But too many parts of the state of been outsourced in a way that makes no sense for HMG and no sense for the outsourcer. As HMG has got stricter with outsourcers driving down profit it has forced outsourcing companies into riskier business areas to keep their margins healthy. This imbalance of risk and reward is infecting the whole industry and putting companies out of business.

Left wing critics have failed to come up with a workable critique of outsourcing beyond some rather tired stuff about evil capitalists. Internal civil service critiques of outsourcing are driven by the desire to build large personal “commands” and a suspicion of commercial management as not really being a gentlemanly pursuit.

But that doesn’t really matter when the advocates of outsourcing are headed by Chis Grayling who is doing a great job of trashing the UK outsourcing industry.