Public service productivity grew 0.3 per cent in the year to June, but remains below its 2019 level
Public service output rose 2.0 per cent while inputs rose 1.6 per cent in the latest ONS quarterly estimates, which continue to indicate a fifth consecutive year of productivity growth in 2025 after the large fall of 2020.
Total public service productivity was 0.3 per cent higher in the year to June 2026 than it had been a year earlier, according to quarterly estimates published by the Office for National Statistics on 6 November. Output from public services grew by 2.0 per cent over the same period, outpacing growth in inputs, the labour, goods and services consumed in providing them, which rose by 1.6 per cent.
The quarterly series measures how efficiently the state turns what it spends into what it delivers, across services from healthcare and education to public administration. The ONS presents it as a short term, timely indicator of its annual public service productivity estimates, and classifies the quarterly figures as official statistics in development.
The longer run in the release points to a slow repair job rather than a return to pre-pandemic efficiency. The ONS says its latest estimates continue to indicate that total public service productivity grew for the fifth consecutive year in 2025, following the large fall recorded in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, but that the level remains 2.9 per cent below where it stood in 2019.
Output is growing faster than inputs again. The recovery is real, but on the latest estimates it has not yet closed the gap opened in 2020.British Journal analysis
Healthcare carries more weight in the total than any other single service. The ONS notes that healthcare is the largest individual service area by share of expenditure, which means that the measured output of hospitals, GPs and other health services, set against the staff and resources they use, does more than any other component to move the headline figure.
The numbers also come with a standing health warning from the statisticians themselves. Because the quarterly estimates are in development, they are revised as better data and improved methods arrive: recent releases in the series have revised earlier figures as the measurement of healthcare inputs has improved, and the shortfall against 2019 in the latest estimates, at 2.9 per cent, is larger than the 2.5 per cent recorded in the August release.
Even with those caveats, the direction of travel in this release is consistent. Public services are producing more per unit of input than a year ago, for the fifth year running on the annual view, while still producing less, relative to inputs, than they did before the pandemic. Closing that remaining gap is the arithmetic on which much of the Government's room to improve services without equivalent spending increases depends.
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