Pay and Workforce Reform

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Pay and wordforce reform policy

“The vast bulk of public servants do a great job often in trying circumstances, which is why we are paying frontline workers more, employing more and safeguarding their pensions. The truth is we have a common desire to improve the service we offer. But that's not really the issue. The issue is how do we do it?”
Prime Minister's speech on Public Service Reform 6 June 2006

This website provides an overview of government policy and strategy on public sector pay and workforce reform.

Why public service reform?

Public service reform is crucial not for its own sake but to achieve the Government's aims for universal opportunity within society, backed by progressive and credible choice for all customers of public services. While there have been improvements in recent years in the ways that public services are offered, which have delivered tangible improvements for the customers of those services (e.g. higher standards of primary education, people helped into work through the New Deal, rates of certain medical conditions cut), there remains much work to do.

Key workforce challenges

The Government's public service reform strategy focuses on giving service users the opportunity to shape services in ways that meet their needs. This can only be achieved with the commitment of a highly motivated, flexible, diverse and skilled workforce, capable of providing high quality, personalised public services. Getting the relationship right between employers and employees so that staff are supported and enabled to deliver those services is key. Developing the right workforce policies and new ways of working underpins this relationship.

Strategic workforce planning

Strategic workforce planning is critical to effective reform and delivery of public services - to ensure that front line public service workers (nurses, teachers, police officers, social workers), who are responsible for achieving that reform and delivery, are recruited, well trained and continuously developed, appropriately rewarded and well managed. Since Spending Review 2002, pay and workforce strategies for public services have been developed to tackle both short and long-term issues, with a strong focus on improved service outcomes and able to respond flexibly to unexpected developments.

Effective strategic workforce planning will encompass the following:

• Strong engagement from top management, to ensure the strategy is closely integrated with business planning and a key driver of future success
• Partnership with trade unions and staff associations to support reform
• Engage workforce in shaping and finalising the strategy
• Based on business's key strategic objectives and underpinned by robust analysis of labour market and demographic trends, economic assumptions and government policy
• Incorporates robust workforce data and analysis
• Identifies future workforce capacity needs and plans to recruit them
• Understands drivers of customer satisfaction and staff motivation and morale, and plans interventions to improve them
• Development of an holistic total reward package
• Plan for talent management and leadership development
• Agree milestones, targets and clear delivery accountabilities, accompanied by a risk management strategy

Recruitment and retention

The public sector workforce is set to grow over the period to 2008, in line with the increased investment in public services planned in Spending Review 2004, primarily in schools, the NHS and the police. The composition of the workforce will also change, reflecting rapidly changing demographics, the development of support worker roles to free up professionals to focus on their core tasks, and challenging targets to increase workforce diversity. All of these will mean employers need to tap into sections of the workforce on which the public sector has not previously relied.

In recruiting to meet these challenges, public service employers need to:

• Understand why people want to work in public services and focus on effective job design that recognises the motivations of potential recruits other than pay. Periodic testing of staff motivation and morale can provide helpful indicators of recruitment and retention factors.
• Attract staff with the right skill sets by building a positive, modern image of public services, with strong branding of the service values and ethos.
• Collaborate with other employers to attract and retain staff and avoid “fishing in the same pool”, making the best use of a strong field of candidates and reduce pay escalation which might result from efforts to outbid the competition.
• Retain the skills in the workforce and use individual skill sets effectively. This might involve offering job enrichment, structured career progression and skills development; giving flexibility and choice around working hours to meet staff needs as they move through their careers; recruiting support workers to free up professionals; creating opportunities for sideways moves and secondments to maintain interest.