Performance Tracker 2023 - Public services as the UK approaches a general election

Produced in partnership by the Institute for Government and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), the analysis examines the comparative, and in many cases interconnected, problems faced by public services – and whether they have sufficient funding or staff to return performance to pre-pandemic levels by 2025, and at the end of the next likely spending review, in 2027/2. [...] In the police, the absolute number of charges fell by 13.5% between 2019/20 and 2021/22, despite the big increase in the number of officers.** Perhaps counterintuitively, the big influx of new recruits has, in fact, been a short-term drain on the productivity of forces due to the amount of supervision and support that they need. [...] If the government had wanted to keep capital spending the same as the average between 2004/05 and 2007/08 for the whole of the 2010s for the departments covered in this report, it would have needed to spend an additional £24bn throughout that decade, in 2023/24 prices – about 12% more than the government actually spent in that time. [...] Most strikingly, in the 12 months to June 2023, the number of British nurses and health visitors fell by 2,763, while the number from the rest of the world increased by 11,984.55 And in adult social care, new joiners from overseas over the past year alone account for 3.6% of all filled posts in the sector. [...] Most critically, there is no credible plan in place to recruit the number of officers needed to safely staff the huge expected increase in prisoners over the next few years due to the greater police numbers cited above; this will also affect courts, in which the current workforce of judges and barristers is likely to be insufficient to process a substantially higher volume of cases in the crown co.