Hire or Fire it’s a problem for the public sector
Hiring and firing in the public sector consumes huge amounts of time and money. The hiring process in the prison sector has 39 steps (a good title for a film?). The National Audit Office found that at HM Revenue & Customs it typically takes 212 days to hire someone.
If it is a tortuous process to hire someone what about firing someone? In 2008 the Labour government and the trade unions agreed a “protocol for handling surplus staff situations” under which the government would almost never force through compulsory redundancies. So people are ‘encouraged’ to leave with generous pay-offs. For example, in 2005-2008 almost 300 people agreed to take early retirement from the Foreign Office. The average payout, on top of pension entitlement, was £162,000.
According to the Cabinet Office in the same 2005-2008 period there were fewer than 100 compulsory redundancies. That equates to just 25 people a year out of 525,000 civil servants.
This inflexible labour market in the public sector seems an ideal candidate for the new government to tackle. After all if an organisation can manage the 7 months it takes to hire someone it can manage very well without them.