Corporate report

UKHSA Advisory Board: UKHSA workforce status

Updated 2 February 2023

Date: Tuesday 24 January 2023

Sponsor: Jac Gardner, Chief People Officer

Presenter: Jac Gardner

Purpose of the paper

At the previous Advisory Board meeting a number of workforce challenges were presented: a ramp down in the overall size of the agency since March 2022 by 40% in line with a reduction in coronavirus (COVID-19) funding (60% reduction in workforce overall from the peak of the pandemic); building our future organisation by recruiting to core roles; and as a consequence of both of these actions, changing the composition of our workforce to comprise mainly of permanent civil servants and reduce the reliance on, and cost of, temporary or contingent labour.

The Board acknowledged the significant amount of organisational change and the recruitment challenges we face. From a capacity perspective, we advised that we were preparing to outsource new recruitment campaigns in order to resource the business as quickly as possible.

In addition, we have been working with Finance to understand the budget implications of our workforce, ensuring that our planned headcount by group is consistent with the budget forecast for year end and into the 2023/2024 financial year.

The purpose of the paper is to provide an update on the UKHSA workforce, it being critical to the delivery of our core services and budget commitments.

Recommendation

The Advisory Board is asked to:

• note the progress made and the remaining work to do to establish a stable organisation
• comment on plans for building our future workforce

Download the UKHSA workforce status PowerPoint slides, presented at the Advisory Board meeting on 24 January 2023.

Current workforce

We have achieved good progress on resizing our workforce:

1. We have reduced the size of the workforce by 60% overall from the peak of the pandemic. Within that reduction we achieved a reduction from 11,100FTE to our budgeted year end figure of 6,700FTE 5 months early.
2. We have made changes to the composition of our workforce, reducing reliance on contractors and contingent labour and recruiting permanent resource. Our permanent civil service workforce has increased from 31% to 54% of our total population, a number that will increase further as we continue to recruit to our core roles and stabilise the business.
3. We have increased the proportion of delivery roles as a percentage of our workforce from 76% in March 2022 to 80% in November 2022, with a planned increase to 83% by March 2023.

To complete our workforce changes, we remain focused on recruitment to permanent roles that are currently filled by fixed term contracts, loans and contingent labour. At the last Advisory Board meeting, we reported on the plans to outsource recruitment. These plans are now operational, with 270 roles live from November across Science, Data Analytics and Surveillance, Health Protection Operations and People groups. Initial feedback has been positive, not only on the service provided by our outsourcing provider but also on the improvement our internal teams have been able to achieve in clearing the recruitment backlog. We will receive regular management information from our outsourced provider, helping us gain valuable insight into our ability to attract and recruit.

Building our future workforce

As we enter the last quarter of our current fiscal year and into a new one, having budget certainty remains a critical feature in being able to build and maintain our future workforce. A key recommendation for the financial year 2023/2024 business planning and budgeting process is that we agree a ‘headcount establishment’ for each group that aligns to the pay budget to help us manage our recruitment and workforce planning with our costs in a more integrated way.

We also need to turn our attention to strategic workforce planning (see appendix slide 4), in particular how we:

• establish a flexible workforce model that enables us to expand and contract to respond operationally to large or multiple incidents
• attract and retain skills and expertise into UKHSA as a large proportion of our roles are non-typical civil service roles. These are the groups that our Employee Value Proposition needs to target, our career paths need to support and our reward frameworks need to recognise
• develop workforce plans that build the future skills we need

Data Analytics and Surveillance (DAS) and Scientific roles are skill areas that we find particularly difficult to recruit to, one of the key reasons being our ability to compete in the market on pay. DAS had already been identified as a critical skill across Civil Service and a Digital, Data and Technology (DDAT) framework to reflect skills and career progression and competitive reward has been established. We are currently developing a business case for our DAS roles that could be included in the DDAT framework, with the initial findings demonstrating an overall saving if we implemented the framework for civil service recruits rather than rely on more expensive consultants and contractors.

A similar framework for Scientific roles does not exist within the Civil Service but is critical; we will have to build it from scratch, and it is a priority piece of work for UKHSA in early 2023 in order to include in our broader reward considerations.

The Board is asked to note that details for a specific reward project, proposed to commence in early 2023, have been developed and will be presented to the People and Culture Committee’s January meeting for comment.

Key discussion points

Progress has been made in building our future workforce, although there is still work to do.

1. Does the Board have any concerns about our workforce plans or anything they would like further assurance on?
2. Are there any considerations we should be factoring into our approach?
3. As we focus on skills for the future, are there opportunities or networks that we should be exploring?

It is proposed that the Advisory Board receives a final workforce update following the end of the current financial year.

Jac Gardner
Chief People Officer
January 2023