Public Practice has published its Annual Report for 2022-2023 with findings on the skills, recruitment, and retention challenges facing Local Government (LG) in 2022-2023.
… attracting qualified and skilled candidates is still the biggest challenge…
Public Practice writes:
This report presents our findings on the skills, recruitment, and retention challenges facing local government in 2022-2023. Through an officer survey, expert roundtable discussion, and insights from our Associate Programme, we highlight the key issues surrounding placemaking capabilities in the public sector.
Public Practice is a social enterprise that places highly skilled built environment practitioners within forward-thinking public authorities, to build the public sector’s capacity to improve the quality, equality and sustainability of places. Through the wide amount of evidence-based research and the daily conversations we have with officers we know that many local authority planning and placemaking teams are under-resourced, and that there is a recruitment and capacity crisis affecting these departments across England. Our survey seeks to build an understanding of the skills gap and the impact that a lack of resources has on officers and their teams across the country.
The following findings highlight a number of challenges of public sector resourcing within the built environment sector, specifically concentrated in recruitment and retention.
The key themes we have identified are:
- The majority of teams are facing capacity challenges resulting in them being unable to meet strategic goals beyond their minimum statutory responsibilities.
- Difficulty attracting qualified and skilled candidates is still the biggest challenge facing respondents.
- The skills gap and current vacancies do not align. The skills which are identified as most needed are some of those for which the least number of new roles are planned. This suggests that recruitment plans are likely to reinforce current strengths and weaknesses of local authority teams rather than adapting to fulfil skill shortages. These findings suggest that current recruitment processes could benefit from a wider skills approach.
