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Almost all British government departments have 10 employee grades or more. The department for environment, food and rural affairs has 13. Most of the middle-level tasks are routine and rigidly regulated and motivation is low: Only 38 percent of middle-level bureaucrats say they feel good about what they do. In the U.K., the average civil servant takes 8 sick days a year, while a private sector worker takes 5. In the last two decades public sector spending rose by an average 3.1 percent a year, about 16 times faster than productivity.

The Reform report discusses how this frozen middle could be thawed. The general idea is to automate information flows and organize remaining employees into project teams that may not even need to be managed. That’s not necessarily a good idea, though many companies in the tech sector — Netflix, GitHub, Zappos — work like this: Informal hierarchies that arise in such an environment can be even more stifling than formal ones. But if work creation is not the goal and efficiency is, the optimal organizational forms will suggest themselves as routine tasks are automated away.

There’s also automation potential for so-called front line jobs where bureaucrats interact with the public. Many people don’t want any human contact in these situations, most people want less of it, and nobody enjoys dealing with government services.

The U.K. has one of the biggest public sectors in the developed world relative to population because health care is socialized. A third of U.K. residents say they’d like to book doctor appointments online, but fewer than 7 percent actually do it because the service is either inconvenient or unavailable. Brits often complain of long waiting times for doctor appointments, yet at the same time, a private-sector service called Babylon provides instant online contact with doctors for a 5 pound monthly fee. With some ingenuity, which is lacking today, the British National Health Service could have put it out of business.