Liz Truss seems to have forgotten that you have to incentivise workers to do demanding jobs

Workers operating in a busted system where there are attacks on staff every 90 minutes. Morale could not be lower in the prison service and bosses say the latest initiatives won’t attract recruits

Liz Truss, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Getty)

Spare a thought for the people on the front line in prisons, hospital wards and care homes. All the demanding jobs you and I don’t want to do – because the stress levels are too high, customer feedback is poor and the pay is rubbish.

This week, Home Secretary Liz Truss trumpeted “the biggest overhaul of prisons in a generation” – reversing staff cuts and announcing plans to recruit over 2,000 new officers and giving them body cameras – but this is like setting out the deckchairs out on the Titanic.

Workers operating in a busted system where there are attacks on staff every 90 minutes. Morale could not be lower in the prison service and bosses say the latest initiatives won’t attract recruits, let alone high quality candidates looking for a fulfilling career rather than a basic wage. It’s the same story with the NHS, where doctors and nurses are quitting in droves – at any time 38 per cent of our nursing staff say they would like to leave and – according to one European study – 42 per cent report burnout, the highest level of 10 countries analysed.

In London, the turnover of nurses is as high as 38 per cent – and the number who voluntarily left the profession increased by 26 per cent between 2009 and 2013. Last week, the Care Quality Commission published a damning report into a hospital in South London where some patients were forced to wait two MONTHS to have their hair washed – because the over-worked nurses said it was “not their job”. I completely agree, it is not the job of a clinically trained nurse who should be given far greater responsibility in decision making and patient assessment; instead they are treated like skivvies and washroom attendants because of a lack of support staff.

Given the responsibility they carry and the people skills involved, prison officers and nurses are woefully under-rewarded – the average salaries are around £21,200 and £23,000 respectively. Who would go into Britain’s overcrowded jails and work in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, not to mention dealing with people high on drugs, for that wage? You’d be better off driving a train, punching tickets or stacking shelves.

In NHS hospitals and in care homes, the elderly make up the bulk of the residents because councils can’t find them places in residential homes and their families don’t want to take responsibility for granny or senile dad. These patients, most of whom shouldn’t be in hospital, need nursing and care assistants to make their lives bearable, to provide help with washing and feeding and exercise. Astonishingly, the average pay for this critical role is less than £15,500 a year. I wonder why we value key workers so poorly? It is a particularly British form of snobbery. I don’t doubt that the NHS has reduced the number of managers in recent years, but the volume of people providing non-clinical services – from cleaners and porters to managers and canteen staff – still outnumbers nurses by a very wide margin.

One of the problems that the NHS and the prison service both have to contend with is relentless bureaucracy, a by-product of target-setting. We are told that the new “improved” prison service will have to meet key targets, but inputting all that data on a daily basis will take more people away from dealing with inmates, it will divert more cash into clerical staff and not front-line workers with people skills. That is exactly what has happened in the NHS. I have loathed targets ever since my days as a senior BBC executive, when the dreaded “mission statements” were introduced and budgets itemised to the nth degree.

Now, government ministers and civil servants want to reduce every job to a tick-box sequence of tasks and goals, and we know what the result will be – fudges and lies, in order to protect jobs and evade even more cuts and “punishments”. Remember the ludicrous results when ambulance drivers were asked to estimate how long it took to get to every job? People in offices in Whitehall can’t understand that working with people – offenders or patients – isn’t a task that can be itemised and results measured like a canning factory.

One of the most inspiring books of the last century is EF Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, subtitled A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. That's the credo politicians need to remember if they truly want results.