Wednesday, Apr 21, 2010
The silent chop
The Times: 225,000 public workers to be axed
More than 225,000 public sector jobs cuts are quietly being forced through by councils, the NHS and police forces, despite Gordon Brown’s pledge to protect frontline services. The cutbacks are already being implemented. Deeper cuts are expected to emerge after the general election, whichever party takes power.
Posted by wanderinman @ 11:51 PM (1107 views) Add Comment
27 Comments
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1. wanderinman said...
I appreciate it may be bad form to immediately comment on my own post. However, I wanted to comment that I can corroborate the above from my personal experience. A relation works for one of the county councils in the home counties. And when I visited her recently, she told me that this council had announced to its staff its intention to make a 20% budget cutback over the next three years, starting from this month. They had been told that 'this bleak financial outlook was unlike anything the council had faced before'.
Friends also working in the public sector are now starting to talk about a "public sector recession".
2. Fra Paolo said...
These links to articles in 'The Blunderer' are useless. One just ends up at a 404 page. If Sir Rupert doesn't want us, let's oblige him by not giving him any clicks.
3. tom101 said...
I bet the contract workers get to keep their jobs!
4. andrew said...
Good, maybe some of those divvy council workers will get off their @rses and do some real work.
5. mark said...
I hope they chop a load from cheshire, especially the corrupt ones you know who you are..
6. honest valuer said...
As the average wage in the public sector is greater than the national average this should hopefully make the house price/earnings ratio even more unaffodable and bring this slow motion house price crash on a bit quicker.
7. mark wadsworth said...
"...despite the pledge to protect frontline services?"
Barely a quarter of taxpayer funded jobs are "frontline" (teachers, coppers, soldiers, binmen etc) so seeing as we are broadly agreed that overall spending has to be reduced but frontline services should be kept, shouldn't that read:
"...in order to fulfil the pledge to protect frontline services"?
8. letthemfall said...
Where is the boundary between frontline and not frontline?
Incidentally, average wage is not greater in public sector. Actually no one knows whether or not there is a difference
9. matt_the_hat said...
I won't notice any difference - says it all
10. andrew said...
Frontline staff are the people that actually do the work. Non-frontline are the managers, the organisers and the backoffice support staff. The distinction is clear for anybody that has had to work.
browse here for non frontline public sector jobs http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/jobs/government/
incidently, most people I know in the private sector have not had a pay rise in 2-3 years, the same cannot be said about the public sector.
11. nomad said...
Here's the rub. Too many administrators in the public sector, but it is they who will decide where the cuts will happen.
Do turkeys vote for Christmas?
In the last decade in the NHS there has been a 26% increase in nurses; a 44% increase in doctors; an 83% increase in adminstrators! Unsurprisingly productivity has dropped 4%.
12. Encdove said...
Finally... payback for all those times my bins bags have been uncollected. Apparently £2500 council tax for two people living in a rented house isn't enough to cover the cost of collecting the occasional extra bin bag. Up yours Horsham Council, hope to see you all begging for pennies down at the shopping centre soon.
13. This comment has been removed as it was found to be in breach of our Blog Policies.
14. mark wadsworth said...
@ LTF 7, what Andrew says at 9. Sure there are grey areas, but we all know what a binman or a copper or a prison officer is or does. Now try looking at the Graun list of jobs - why on earth would the Forestry Commission need a Press Officer?
15. letthemfall said...
Too many administrators, backoffice staff do no real work ... On what are these assertions based? Plenty of these workers in the private sector too. Really these arguments hinge on prejudice, not objectivity.
Some public sector workers have had long-term real wage declines. Though, to be fair, so has the lower paid in some parts of the private sector (30% in the US I read).
16. 51ck-6-51x said...
wanderinman said, "I appreciate it may be bad form to immediately comment on my own post"
- I don't think so at all. Much better than putting your comment in the article summary as do some sometimes.
17. letthemfall said...
mw "why on earth would the Forestry Commission need a Press Officer?"
Come to that, why would any organisation need a press officer?
18. 51ck-6-51x said...
Some logical reasoning (no not assertion) for why there are probably more back-office staff in a public sector organisation (generally - as it is perfectly feasible that a public sector organisation could be very streamlined, or a private sector one inefficient):
* When an organisation is not one of a number of competitors, yet has budgetary requirements, there is [obviously?] a greater internal demand for the analysis of [one's own] performance since such feedback is not as easy to garner in the first place (with a market one just analyses competitors strategies & performance, without a market one must attempt to analyse one's own performance under differing strategies- whether theoretically or by adjustment and measurement)
* What Nomad said: "Do turkeys vote for Christmas?" - over time (like a bubble, until it busts as it seems to be doing now). However the same can (and often does) apply in the private sector, maybe the bubble bursts sooner with competitive pressures in general though.
19. mark wadsworth said...
@ LTF 12: "Too many administrators, backoffice staff do no real work ... On what are these assertions based?"
On the simple observation that there are eight million taxpayer funded jobs in this country and only two million 'frontline' public sector workers.
20. mr g said...
@Andrew "Non-frontline are the managers, the organisers and the backoffice support staff"
I'm sure this is correct in the public sector as it currently stands.
However IMHO, real operations (not a pun, it's not meant in the medical sense) managers, organisers and progress chasers are required to kick a*se as in manufacturing production, not the admin and accountant types that plague the public sector at present.
21. letthemfall said...
mark w: Simple observation? Indeed it is. I still wonder where the boundary lies between "frontline" and "non-frontline", and why the latter are supposed to be valueless. Are there data that distinguish the two? Can one not make the distinction in the private sector? Should the local supermarket get rid of its managers and finance people, keeping only the shelf-fillers and people on the tills?
PS Are you frontline or non-frontline?
PPS How's the campaign going? When elected, how much will Ukip spend on restoring Britishness to our wonderful country? Will you set up a Britishness Research Institute?
22. andrew said...
The same problems exist in the private sector, in fact where the managers begin to outnumber the "doers" then the company declines, more often than not they can't see why, but the problem is quite clear.
It is not prejudice to say that this goes on in the public sector, the reason why it is so important is that the more non-essential staff we have the more taxes we all pay, the less money we all have.
For the record, the industry that i work in (private sector) has the same problem but at least the money we waste is our own.
23. letthemfall said...
But how does one determine who are the non-essential staff? (I must admit I don't think much of managers and I could happily have seen the back of most I've known.)
Yes, the problem exists in both sectors. But the private sector does not waste its own money as such; it wastes its customers' money. Customers equal taxpayers. Choice, such as it exists, is hard to exercise because the information is not public. We pay up.
Public sector data, on the other hand, is generally public. Another point is that efficiency in private and public sectors mean different things: max profit in the private; consistent levels of service on demand in the public. One cannot apply the same criteria.
24. mark wadsworth said...
LTF, I am tax advisor in private, so in the wider sense I am just the flipside of all the government imposed red tape, in the narrower sense I am very much frontline.
There is no "boundary", of course hospitals need cooks and cleaners and porters, and doctors need receptionists and so on; of course a police station will need a mechanic or two and somebody to look after the computers and a tea lady and cleaners; and every organisation needs a payroll lady and a bookkeeper, but I cannot imagine for the life of me how every single frontline worker needs an additional three back up staff in endless tiers of management above him or her.
And comparisons with the private sector are entirely illusory. You can bet your bottom dollar that Tesco have exactly the right mix of checkout girls, cleaners, lorry drivers, shelf stackers as against managers, advertising people, computer whizzkids - and if they are wasting too much money a) it doesn't cost customers a penny and b) they'd go out of business.
If Tesco had an additional three highly paid managers, advertising people and computer whizzkids for every checkout girl or lorry driver they would never have succeeded in business.
25. andrew said...
resp. @20 The customer has a choice, the customer can look for a cheaper service or product. An inefficient private company eventually will be forced to stop trading. The information is public because you can compare prices between services and products.
The same cannot be said of the public sector, inefficiency means everybody paying more tax which is unfair.
26. letthemfall said...
MW: If comparisons are entirely illusory, why are you comparing the public and private sectors? Your remarks about Tesco staffing are tacit assumptions. They may work at maximum efficiency (if there is such a thing) but big companies have great economic power, even leaving aside the occasional malpractice of cartels. They could be more "efficient" by reducing profits (or executive salaries) and passing these savings on to their customers.
The matter of choice is illusory. In the case of the supermarkets their economic power gives them considerable pricing control. The case of the banks illustrates that competitive free markets do not automatically work at maximum efficiency.
But as you say, comparisons between the two are misleading, not to say invidious. Private and public sector perform different functions and cannot be directly compared. All the figures you quote are largely meaningless, just like comparisons between mean salaries in the two sectors. To make headway on what is an interesting topic would require some thorough research rather than some of the bald statements here. Still, it's all de rigeur for a politician.
27. wanderinman said...
When I posted this article I did think that the comments would end up as a public sector vs private sector discussion.
So if I may be bold enough to try to steer this comment thread in a new direction. Two thoughts came to mind from reading this article.
Firstly, this suggests that severe budget cutbacks, as opposed to inflating the problem away, are definitely on the cards for addressing the national debt. Or, on second thoughts, maybe we'll get a combination of the cutbacks to halt the deficit, and inflating away the accumulated national debt.
And secondly this surely exposes as a barefaced lie Gordon Clown's campaign assertion that he won't cut back public spending until the recovery is 'assured' (whatever that's supposed to mean), and protect NHS and police. He says they won't cutback for another year, yet here they are already starting to do that very thing.
Oh, what a wicked web he weaves when he practises to deceive.