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

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.

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.

*1981

Thank you for the link OakDryad. ?

“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.

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

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/

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

My friend works for the Civil Service in housing. He's been there years and is just a regular Joe who works very hard in a job he feels passionate about. He worked all through lock down, commuting across town on public transport (2 buses each way) to his office.

He works helping homeless people into housing. Ironically his salary isn't enough for him to buy or pay more than the basic rent so he lives in a second rate and depressing static caravan he rents on farmland.

These are the type of people who will be cast aside if this latest scheme ever gets off the ground. This is not about ditching overpaid fat cats. It's about discarding ordinary working folk who make an honest buck ensuring the nuts and bolts of our society work.

If the government really wanted to save money they would stop giving million pound contracts to their friends and would close all the necessary loopholes to ensure billionaires paid their tax fairly.

Often those who applaud the culling of civil servants fail to think through the implications. The work of government still has to be carried out. If/when that work is privatised, or more likely, quangos are created to do it instead, costs rise.

Capita, Serco and G4S spring to mind, as do the unlamented Regional Development Agencies of the noughties. Certainly the RDAs employed former civil servants at inflated salaries - who paid? Correct, the jolly old tax payer.

Culling civil servants is a wheeze, a sound bite. Nothing substantial comes of it.

What the government could do is get rid of overpaid, often maverick SpADs and use civil servants instead. That would save a bob or two.

AGAA4

My experience working in local government was that it was skimmed down to the bone.
People were being retired off early and not replaced.

I've never worked in local government, but I know people who have (and some who still do). That's what I've heard too.

My experience working in local government was that it was skimmed down to the bone.
People were being retired off early and not replaced.

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

Great article Casdon. Essential reading for anybody who wants to understand how any "cull" would be achieved.

Just to clarify, this proposed cut is nothing to do with local government, it’s civil servants, ie those who work directly for the English/UK government functions. It isn’t staff who work for the NHS either. The list of services affected is in the article I posted above. It is one in 5 approximately of all civil servants, and does not equate to the number of posts there were pre 2016.