Public services are only as good as their back office administration

My other half just sent me an article entitled “How universities have been reorganised into incompetence” detailing how budget cuts have forced universities to streamline their administration tier. The result has been to burden academics with a massive amount of procedural red tape, with no real support to navigate the compliance systems. This is exactly in line with her own experiences of working in a shrinking Yorkshire academic institution.

The author of the piece notes how essential this kind of back office support is.

The people who administer the work of universities are known as professional services staff, or PS for short. As if their work was some sort of additional postscript to what universities do. Nothing could be further from the truth. Without these people, there would be nobody to recruit and register the students. Lectures would not happen, because nobody would know where to go, or when. Degrees could not be awarded, as students’ marks would be a jumbled mess. Research would grind to a halt, as nobody could work out how to pay for researchers, facilities or travel. Indeed, there would be no staff, with no human resources team to hire them. Universities would exist solely as increasingly ivy-clad ruins.

While I don’t want to republish the whole thing, the next part is key to my argument.

They are always the first targets when university managers run the budget into deficit. As this is now a virtually universal feature of UK higher education, professional services across the land have been restructured; multiple times at some particularly cash-strapped institutions.

The usual process is for senior managers to shrink and centralise PS teams, and to replace functions that used to be done by humans with clunky online systems. This often causes chaos, especially in the first year, as nobody knows how the new systems work. Lectures are scheduled in locked rooms. Marks go missing en masse. The National Student Survey score for ‘how well-organised is your course’ goes down the toilet (and staff get the blame).

Eventually, things calm down, as people get the knack of the new IT. Life goes back to some version of normality. Senior managers pat themselves on the back for succeeding in their bizarre mission to reduce the proportion of the university’s budget that is spent on people.

What their deliberately incomprehensible spreadsheets do not show is the wider cost incurred. This is borne by both academic and PS staff in the intensification, slowing down and enshittification of their work. Instead of friendly teams of colleagues with a common purpose, we are turned into atomised individuals, pressing buttons on impersonal systems.

This is not unique to academia. This is normal for any large bureaucracy. What these cuts do is pass on the admin load to academics, while overloading the remaining admin staff with menial chores, de-skilling the role in the process. This is something my other half laments, and she spends more and more of her time filling out compliance forms rather than developing research strategies. What’s then lost is institutional knowledge and any kind of in-depth knowledge of how the system actually works.

This is then compounded by efficiency drives, funnelling everything through central IT systems which don’t take into account any of the operational nuances on the front line. This is what spawns countless unsanctioned VBA spreadsheets. There is little to no departmental autonomy and these unofficial systems only work until someone quits.

This is something I’ve seen countless times in my own career. In fact, I wouldn’t even have had a career were it not for this dynamic. My specialism (or one of them) was developing automated Microsoft Access and Excel tools to do all the jobs that weren’t thought about when the central mainframe systems were developed. I remember having to develop an emergency system to keep track of looked after children in a social services department because they were losing track of where kids actually lived. Meanwhile, the workflow system I developed for an aircraft manufacturer was done without upper management approval, and its development was kept secret. Better to ask forgiveness than permission.

We’ve seen the same dynamic in social services, the NHS and the police, where the politicians have come along with big ideas about streamlining the bureaucracy, only to land front line staff with more admin chores. The point here is that any public service is only as good as its back office administration. The slop right will often complain at the number of managers in the NHS but large organisations need to be managed.

The problem for most large organisations is that bureaucracy is self-perpetuating, and is always subject to shake-ups and re-organisations, keeping systems in a permanent state of flux where nobody knows how anything actually works - which has inherent costs of its own.

Again, I’m not saying that there isn’t room to trim the fat and modernise public sector administration but this has to be done on a case by case basis. When I looked at health policy, I arrived at the conclusion that a patient wristband system to record the chain of accountability would go a long way to solving the bottlenecks.

What you actually need is systems administrators (like me but with better coding skills and a stronger work ethic) to go in an understand an organisation, talk to the people doing the actual work, and build systems around what they actually do. If, though, you’re coming in with ideological notions of swinging the axe, you run the risk of breaking things that actually work quite well.

This is why I’m cautious of people like Rupert Lowe who hold ideological notions that most government is useless and that civil servants are mostly parasitic and add no value. Effective administration and enforcement is what makes the difference. Part of the reason we have a backlog in the justice system was because we closed down police stations and magistrates courts, and part of the reason we have so many vape shops is because we cut the number of inspectors. This is how you end up with buildings burning down.

Ultimately, any government rationalisation programme has to start of by asking what it is you want government to do, and ensure that it has the right number of front line staff with a functioning back office that allows them to do what they’re trained to do. The slop right, though, starts off on the promise that most government is useless and that which does exists is stuffed to the gunwales with non-jobbers such as DEI officers.

If you tell me that there are too many civil servants and that there is too much red tape and too much waste, I’m not going to disagree, but I’m not going to let you loose on it unless you can accurately tell me what is going wrong, what cuts you will make, and how you define waste.

The problem here is that we’re dealing with people who have no real experience of running things. There is not a lot a multimillionaire business mandarin can tell us about public administration, especially libertarian bores who don’t see how effective regulation and administration enhances a society. While they drone on about quangos, they’re hard pressed to identify a single one that serves no function at all.

As much as anything, any party making grand claims about rationalising the state will soon find itself embarrassed. Most of our problems stem from decades of policy neglect that will necessarily require additional administration, especially if the plan is to get a grip on immigration. Governing Britain is going to require a lot more than a collection of spicy tweets.