Ease the cost of living crisis by making more people unemployed ?

You paint the picture very well Ayse

Cameron’s austerity government cut the civil service making it a fifth smaller by summer 2016. Two calamities have increased the numbers back closer to this figure.

Brexit required thousands of staff to negotiate trade deals, and work on and carry out trade rules. Covid required experts needed to run vaccine programmes, find and buy equipment, and administer furlough payments. Often they were working from what seemed to be back of the envelope instuctions.

Reducing either of these cohorts now might seem to make sense. Sunak wants to cut those not on the frontline of the civil service back to its size in 2019. That could mean 28,000 jobs going.

If you think Brexit is done and covid is over then you might think this was going to be easy. But an unthought out Brexit means there are additional tasks for civil servants that we didn't have before and, it appears, no one had calculated on us doing for ourselves. Of the jobs once done in Brussels (weren't we told we would save on what we paid for that) - many still exist and some are now more complicated. The pandemic revealed how worn-out and down to the bone parts of the civil service had become. We need it to be ready to tackle the next crisis.

Changes have been needed since the last hack into our Civil Service by the Tories but it would be helpful if, for once, they clarified what they are aiming for and what they plan to achieve it. Cutting services for the sake of saving the rich on their taxes will not go down very well.

If this were a remake of ‘Downfall’ Rees-Mogg would be Goebbels. I am not joking here.

growstuff

AGAA4

BJ wants to privatise the civil service. He will get rid of staff then outsource to private companies.
I think SERCO have been used before in the civil service according to my son who has worked there for 20 years.

And Capita.

Working there for 13 years before (despite the incredibly good hours) I could stand it no longer and defected to the private sector. Is that enough to have formed an opinion? And my local government pension, even though I was in a much more junior position and earned a lot less, and to which the taxpayer contributed a significant amount, has performed so much better than my private pensions.

Perhaps your info is more up to date than mine volver.

I worked in Local Government all my working life, taking voluntary redundancy in 2014. In my experience the last 14 years were pretty grim; staff left and were not replaced, my section alone was pared down from 8 persons to 4. Many other sections were so understaffed that it was hard to deliver a decent service. I had to contact my own section last year with a query - the phone was never answered and I resorted to emailing them - still no answer. I fear it would be impossible to cut down any more on staffing levels, if anything, they need a recruitment drive.

Germanshepherdsmum

growstuff

AGAA4

BJ wants to privatise the civil service. He will get rid of staff then outsource to private companies.
I think SERCO have been used before in the civil service according to my son who has worked there for 20 years.

And Capita.

Working there for 13 years before (despite the incredibly good hours) I could stand it no longer and defected to the private sector. Is that enough to have formed an opinion? And my local government pension, even though I was in a much more junior position and earned a lot less, and to which the taxpayer contributed a significant amount, has performed so much better than my private pensions.

Thank you for your reply. It was just a question.

Incidentally, I have a pension from a private company, which pays a better return than my teacher and local government ones do.

Funding to local authorities has been relentlessly cut by Tory central government to the point that it os almost impossible for councils to meet their statutary obligations.

www.jrf.org.uk/sites/default/files/jrf/migrated/files/Summary-Final.pdf

Germanshepherdsmum

growstuff

AGAA4

BJ wants to privatise the civil service. He will get rid of staff then outsource to private companies.
I think SERCO have been used before in the civil service according to my son who has worked there for 20 years.

And Capita.

Working there for 13 years before (despite the incredibly good hours) I could stand it no longer and defected to the private sector. Is that enough to have formed an opinion? And my local government pension, even though I was in a much more junior position and earned a lot less, and to which the taxpayer contributed a significant amount, has performed so much better than my private pensions.

I thought we were discussing the Civil Service, not Local Government?

Germanshepherdsmum

growstuff

AGAA4

BJ wants to privatise the civil service. He will get rid of staff then outsource to private companies.
I think SERCO have been used before in the civil service according to my son who has worked there for 20 years.

And Capita.

Working there for 13 years before (despite the incredibly good hours) I could stand it no longer and defected to the private sector. Is that enough to have formed an opinion? And my local government pension, even though I was in a much more junior position and earned a lot less, and to which the taxpayer contributed a significant amount, has performed so much better than my private pensions.

How long ago was that though Germanshepherdsmum? I don’t think experience of working for local government more than 10 years ago really counts for anything in terms of understanding the pressures people are increasingly working under.

Georgesgran

Perhaps your info is more up to date than mine volver.

I think yours is more recent Georgesgran

It's just that your post read as though them losing the contract for passports was a good thing and they had started making profit because of it.

Their profits slumped and they had to reorganise the whole business, so it wasn't pain free. They have manufacturing locations all over the world and they do more than banknotes.

Whitewavemark2

Another headline that takes away focus from the idiot and his crimes.

Anyone seen this?

John Cleese
@JohnCleese
A quite astonishing story on Byline Times by Sam Bright

Dominic Cummings has revealed that Johnson arranged
'bungs'- bribes - to British papers in exchange for
favourable coverage and government advertising

The worst corruption in British history - and unreported of course

A friend passes on Byline Times to me sometimes. Do you know which issue the Sam Bright story is in?

Jane43 The story is dated 11 May 2022 by Adam Bienkov, Sam Bright and Brian Cathcart. Here:

bylinetimes.com/2022/05/11/bungs-to-billionaires-cummings-exposes-johnsons-cash-for-content-scandal/

Perhaps it’s time for a ‘Reagan and the air traffic controllers’ moment.

“On August 5 1968, following the PATCO workers' refusal to return to work, the Reagan administration fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life.”

Did wonders for his presidential ratings apparently.

Thank you for the link OakDryad. ?

*1981

Heavens volver - that wasn’t what I wasn’t trying to say - sorry if I misled. I just commented after other posters mentioned the passport offices. It was a blow to the area when de la Rue closed the Gateshead factory and the closure was fought against of course, but I think printing bank notes had already been transferred ‘down South’, so I suppose the loss of the passport contract left the NE factory with no work.

Not to mention being told by HMRC, the Passport Office and the Office of the Public Guardian on more than one occasion "Sorry, I'm working from home and I can't access that part of the computer system" and "I can't transfer your call because I'm working from home so I'll email one of my colleagues and ask them to call you" which, of course, they never do.

Apparently they now now feel they can work from abroad. That's possibly true, but of course so can Indian call centres at a fraction of the cost. Be careful what you wish for civil serpents.

Rees-Mogg has now opened a new front in the battle. Rather than putting notices up he is ripping old ones down, removing Covid posters that informed civil servants to keep two metres apart and the like.

“I have asked the Government Property Agency, which comes under this department, and in the buildings it operates, to take the posters down,” he explained. “The notices saying ‘only one person allowed in the lift’ need to come down because it is no longer true that only one person is allowed in the lift. There is absolutely no need for those notices.”

On the BBC news website there is an article from today Friday 13th may where Rees-Mogg was reported to have said the following:
“He said his own department, the Cabinet Office, had imposed an employment freeze for the last six months.’
I’ve just checked on the civil service jobs website and there are 31 job adverts listed for the Cabinet Office. Some of these adverts are for just one post. But some of the Cabinet Office job adverts are for more than one post. For example one Cabinet Office job advert is for ‘Grade 7 Data Architects’ with 30 posts available.
So my question is this: Is Mr Rees-Mogg incompetent or was he lying?

Urmstongran

Rees-Mogg has now opened a new front in the battle. Rather than putting notices up he is ripping old ones down, removing Covid posters that informed civil servants to keep two metres apart and the like.

“I have asked the Government Property Agency, which comes under this department, and in the buildings it operates, to take the posters down,” he explained. “The notices saying ‘only one person allowed in the lift’ need to come down because it is no longer true that only one person is allowed in the lift. There is absolutely no need for those notices.”

Hmmm ... has he been taking lessons from Piers Corbyn?

Civil Service diplomats work abroad, their jobs are based abroad. Civil Servants working from home are not allowed to use their computer equipment abroad because of data security issues.

Casdon

Boris and Rees-Mogg are talking through their arses as usual, with absolutely no investigation into the achievability of this plucked out of the air target, as Smogg admitted this morning.

This makes very interesting reading if you want to see whether the cuts will fall (if it ever happens, which it won’t)
www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/civil-service-staff-numbers

That was an informative link, Casdon.

The trouble is, my faith in this Government is now so low that I don't actually expect them to be any more accurate about which jobs fall into the 'civil servant' catagory than Joe public.
What I mean is that if it suits their narrative, either now or in the future, to surreptitiously include job reductions from things like Local Government into the figures that they spout, I don't have the slightest doubt that they will do it! I now expect them to lie and/or deliberately mislead, such is their obvious contempt for the ordinary people of this country.

Jacob Rees-Mogg has told of his “suspicions” that civil servants are only working a three-day week, as the Government went to war with Whitehall mandarins.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Rees-Mogg – the Cabinet minister in charge of government efficiency – accused civil servants of working from home on Mondays and Fridays because they “think that the working week is shorter than it really is”. (copied from The Telegraph today)

They think they can do what they like full pay for working part time, cull the lot of them starting with the so called mandarins who think they are untouchable.