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 need to “interrogate the assumptions that all too often lie unexamined beneath the discussion of productivity. In effect, we must always be asking the question ‘productivity of what?’ In particular, when thinking about those activities in which the personal element is intrinsic to the exchange, we must ask whether any ostensible gain in productivity risks undermining the true, underlying good we should be seeking.”
Against a backdrop of calls across the political spectrum to tackle the UK’s sluggish productivity, the report acknowledges that “it is harder to improve living standards without economic growth, and it is hard to grow the economy as a whole without improving our collective productivity”.
It says that increasing productivity during the past century led to “a rapid improvement in living standards, better healthcare, and improved life expectancy”. The country’s more recent performance is “weak”, it says. Since 2008, productivity has “almost stalled, growing at a much slower rate than its comparators”. A lack 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 subject of “a near obsessive focus of economic policy”, productivity has escaped scrutiny. Productivity is “so obviously, so self-evidently important and necessary, that we omit to ask why or, more heretically, whether that is the case”.
The report goes on to warn that, in our attempts to improve productivity, “we might be in danger of severing the correlation between productivity and human wellbeing that ultimately makes productivity growth something worth pursuing”.
Surveying a landscape in which 84 per cent of the workforce is employed in the “service sector” — a realm in which productivity gains are likely harder to attain and in which “human interactions are central to our exchanges” — it argues that “an unqualified emphasis on improving productivity can lead to undermining the very kinds of personal connections that make us human.”
It is these “personal goods”, such as interest, inspiration, encouragement, attention, sympathy, and patience, evident in services such as social care, that are “most vulnerable to being lost when the push for improved productivity enters into the conversation”, it says (Comment, 30 August). It gives the example of a GP being encouraged to reduce the length of appointments so that a higher number of patients can be seen.
“A great many activities are intrinsically personal, the good of personal contact being important and sometimes even essential to them,” it concludes. “That personal connection is not amenable to productivity improvements, at least not without betraying itself.”
Productivity was a significant 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 in the NHS, where the number of appointments, operations, and procedures had not kept pace with increases in staff numbers.
“Instead of putting their time and talents into achieving better outcomes, clinicians’ efforts are wasted on solving process problems, such as ringing around wards desperately trying to find available beds,” he writes. Hospitals needed to bring down waiting lists through “better operational management, capital investment in modern buildings and equipment, and re-engaging and empowering staff”. The NHS remains “in the foothills of digital transformation”, and needs a “major tilt towards technology”.