A quick drink with Peter Warburton of Halkin Services and the shadow MPClast night. He pointed to one of the more unexpected results of the beginnings of austerity in the UK: rising public sector productivity.
The Office for Budget Responsibility's July 2010 projections were for headcount reductions across the public sector of 60,000 by the end of March 2012 and 490,000 by the end of March 2015. In fact, things have moved rather faster: the public sector payroll had fallen by about 350,000 (or 284,000 full-time equivalents) by the end of 2011. Public sector output, says Warburton, is fraught with measurement problems but, "in so far as the data is consistent", we can see an upward trend in productivity, presumably as a result.
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