Agency staff represent the problem, not the solution

In the last few years, debate about the future of Glasgow city has almost always included discussion of the state of the city centre, and in particular litter and graffiti.

While you can argue that the challenges facing modern cities is a lot bigger than litter, litter is an immediate visible representation that something isn't right, and it blights lives on a daily basis. People find it frustrating because big economic changes may seem complex and difficult to deal with but surely picking up litter is straightforward?

Today it is revealed that Glasgow has been spending to try and bring the problem under control. The City Council has spent £5 million on agency staff to get a grip on litter on Glasgow's streets. On the face of it this may seem like a sensible response, but in fact it is a sign of poor management and short-term thinking.

Litter is not a problem that comes and goes. Sanitation of all sorts is forever when it comes to humans. While civic responsibility may wane and wax and psychological factors like alienation and despair can change people's behaviours, the production of waste is built into modern life and so managing it will be an ongoing task. These are not problems which appear suddenly.

There is a legitimate use for external contractors when there are activities and tasks which are never going to be repeated or which recur so rarely it does not make sense to keep people permanently employed. It can also be worth bringing in external contractors if there are seasonal peaks in workload.

These are not issues which should crop up in refuse management. While there will be spikes of demand (for example around public festivals), these are almost entirely predictable. These are the core business of waste management. If the underlying system cannot cope with these then it is not fit for purpose.

Because there are also very good reasons not to use agency staff. Political embarrassment is not one of the good reasons for using agency staff. If politicians use short-term agency staff to deal with short-term problems which cause embarrassment, the whole system becomes an unstable, lurching mess of short-term actions substituting for proper long-term planning.

This is what has happened in the NHS. Poor working conditions for nursing staff has pushed more and more of them to leave direct employment and seek agency work. They will mostly be working for the same ultimate employer, but now they have much greater control over their working patterns.

The corollary is that the NHS has less control and is constantly dealing with a system which is understaffed and which they can only bring under control by paying a premium for staff they don't control to come in and do the jobs that workforce was previously doing anyway. It becomes a process of permanently trying to fill staffing shortages.

And that points to the second problem; agency staff are fundamentally expensive. For shift workers, the premium is between 25 to 75 per cent of wages on a permanent basis. This covers the overheads and, of course, the profits of the private operators.

This gets politicians out of short-term problems. They have thrown money at a it and it has receded. But they have not solved the problem, they have over-paid short term to clear up the problem once. And they have done it at great expense and in a way which is not sustainable.

It may not be coincidental to this that the issue of litter appears to be fragmented, with responsibility appearing to lie with at least the Neighbourhoods, Regeneration and Sustainability department, Land and Environmental Services department and Neighbourhood Improvement and Enforcement Service.

This is fairly typical of the HR and finance driven modern public service, with multiple often obliquely named departments with fashionably thematic titles which duplicate activity in the same area because the large thematic purposes overlap. And they're all in financial deficit already.

Bringing in short-term agency staff will reduce the political pressure on elected officials, for a while at least. But it does not represent a fundamental change in the operations which created the problem in the first place. And it has wasted time and money on a short-term fix.

To understand how to resolve this you need to think about what this would look like if you unwound the outcomes of 40 years of the above. If the bureaucratic empires which created and manage this system did not exist, the resource they extract would be available to spend on waste collection and street sanitation.

Instead, we pay a very substantial premium for people who created an unstable spinning top of public bureaucracy that needs permanent injections of emergency funding to stop it wobbling uncontrollably in one direction or the other. Forever.