Public workers can resell services

Millions of public sector workers will be allowed to leave their jobs and sell back their services, Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said.

The coalition government is to press ahead with its promise to give staff the right to request or bid to leave to form social enterprises and resell their services to councils, the NHS, the government and other parts of the public sector. A few exceptions would include the armed forces and the police, Mr Maude said.

Labour introduced a “right to request” to the NHS which, after a slow start, has seen about 20 staff groups forming social enterprises. District nurses and therapists make up the largest of these groups.

Mr Maude told a conference held by the 2020 Public Services Trust at the Royal Society of Arts that from nurses and social workers to local authority staff “there is a huge pent-up frustration among those who see how things could be done differently.

“Among those there will be plenty who are themselves entrepreneurs who will see the opportunity to lead their own teams into mutuals”, reproviding the service while gaining control of what they do in not-for-profit organisations.

The government intended to strengthen the “right to request” in the NHS, providing a non-bureaucratic appeal mechanism where staff felt obstacles were being put in their way, he said.

In local government, Eric Pickles, the community secretary, is considering “a right to bid”. Similar ideas are being developed for central government, although the precise form it will take is likely to vary by department, he said. Mr Maude acknowledged that one of the biggest obstacles to Labour’s attempts to get such enterprises off the ground has been public sector pensions. Staff have been reluctant to lose their final salary schemes, and those leaving the NHS to date have been allowed to retain them.

But that is unlikely to provide a long-term solution and Lord Hutton’s public sector pensions inquiry is reviewing the issue.

Treasury ministers are also due to open talks with the unions over the Fair Deal rules, under which a voluntary agreement stipulates that staff must receive a broadly comparable pension when they are transferred to the private or voluntary sectors.

Mr Maude said the big rise coming in employee contributions to public sector schemes would help create a more level playing field with private sector pensions.