By UNISON general secretary Andrea Egan
Britain’s public services are under extraordinary pressure. Hospitals are struggling with growing waiting lists and staff shortages. Schools are being asked to compensate for issues of child poverty and declining family support. Many local councils are facing financial collapse after years of cuts. Social care remains trapped in crisis, with workers underpaid, overstretched and undervalued.
These problems are not isolated. They are symptoms of a political and economic model that has prioritised short-term savings, privatisation and market competition over long-term social investment and democratic accountability. The measures outlined in the King’s Speech fail to recognise the scale of transformation now required across the UK.
Despite increases in capital spending on new infrastructure, there is little to address the chronic underfunding of public services, the erosion of public sector pay, or the widening gap between the wealthiest in society and ordinary working people. At a time when millions face rising costs and growing insecurity, the government continues to rely on incremental reform rather than structural change.
The continued dependence on outsourcing and privatisation is particularly concerning with no sign of a public procurement bill. For decades, governments have handed public contracts to private companies on the promise of efficiency and value for money. Yet too often the result has been fragmented services, weakened accountability and profits extracted from essential public provision.
A radically different approach is needed. Public money should support decent jobs, strong labour standards, environmental responsibility and local economic development. Labour promised the “biggest wave of insourcing of public services for a generation” but this has simply not happened and there is no indication of any serious planning to turn the commitment into a reality.
Transparency must also become non-negotiable. The procurement scandals exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the damage caused when contracts are awarded without proper scrutiny or competition. Public trust depends upon openness, accountability and democratic oversight.
Equally important is the principle of ‘in-house first’. Public bodies should be legally required to consider direct public provision before outsourcing services. Too often, outsourcing has become an automatic assumption rather than a decision based on evidence or public interest.
The continual postponement of social care reform is another major failure.
For years, governments have acknowledged the crisis in care while postponing serious action. Meanwhile, care workers, the majority of whom are women, continue to deliver vital services for low pay and insecure conditions.
Britain needs to end the current racket of privately-owned social care provision and replace it with a properly funded National Care Service built around dignity, fairness and workforce respect. This would not only improve the quality of social care we provide to people, but provide much-needed relief for local government finances, which are currently tied up by extortionate payments to private care facilities, particularly for children’s care.
Equality must also be central to any serious programme for national renewal.
An Equalities Bill is urgently needed to strengthen protections against discrimination and close persistent pay gaps affecting women, disabled workers and Black and global majority communities. Equality cannot be treated as secondary to economic policy because inequality itself damages economic performance, social cohesion and democratic trust. No government can genuinely claim to be progressive if it is attacking the rights of vulnerable groups such as migrant workers, as this government is doing.
Public service workers carried the country through periods of enormous national difficulty. Nurses, carers, teaching assistants, council workers, emergency responders and countless others kept communities functioning under immense strain. Yet many now face stagnant pay, rising workloads and declining living standards. That contradiction cannot continue.
A government that is serious about rebuilding Britain must stop treating public services as a financial burden and start recognising them as the foundation of a healthy and successful society.
A radical change of approach is needed. Revenue must be raised via redistributive taxes including a wealth tax and further increases to capital gains tax, and proposals to increase military spending must be cancelled.
Only a government willing to prioritise strong public services and the interests of working people over entrenched wealth has any realistic chance of delivering lasting national renewal.
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