It has been reported that Birmingham is to lay off huge numbers from their public sector in order to save money. I suspect that other councils will follow. Local government will probably have to follow given that Central government has gone bust and cannot afford to pass public money down to the public.
Gordon Brown will never admit it but he must rein in public spending. He has obviously starved the public sector of real money whilst investing heavily on his spin doctors,special advisors, trusts, committees, quangos and men in grey suits. This is the real scandal of the public sector.
Birmingham is probably going to sack people at the lower clerical end, the very people who need their jobs. They should be sacking the overpaid lackeys who clog up the system but do not contribute to it.
While I am at it...how come someone like Commander Desaei, the crook who was so over promoted that he abused his position in the police and has subsequently been jailed can claim a pension pot of a million pounds. Who actually voted for public servants to receive such bloated pension payouts. It is disgraceful! The chief officers of the local government sector have been granted by NoLab vastly inflated salaries and pensions.
I have blogged this before but how can nine chief officers in Leicestershire take out over a million pounds of taxpayer's money before a penny has been spent. It is ruinous and they are not worth it. The people that we need are the professionals not the government lackeys. This is the challenge to David Cameron. If only he would stand up at Question Time and announce that he would get rid of the non-contributors and invest the savings in services to the public.
Why do we never get these proposals from the Tories? Is it because they want the same lackeys to get the EU message over? We actually need midwives, good social workers, decent teachers, firefighters and above all real policemen but what the public needs is being denied because we are spending on the non contributors.
The Tories should really address this issue but they don't and that is why I suspect their motives.
It is obviously time to cull the public sector but cull the right people and spare those who need their jobs.
2 comments:
Well Bryboy. 20 years ago I was a Deputy Chief Officer for a major Far North Regional Capital (not Manchester) try East Coast. My salary then was £30k which was 2/3 that of my immediate boss at the time. Salaries at his and my level have totally spiralled since then and far far more than those of the mass of Local Government employees. Why? Because it is the Chief Exec and Chief Officers who control their own salaries and Councillors were too afraid to resist. I could further explain but would take too long.
I was , inter alia, responsible for internal management consultancy. Guess what? They made me redundant after nearly 30 years service!!
No problem I just went freelance and earned 2-3 times what I was paid in Local Government. Wish I'd done it sooner.
We were always told that our salaries were lower than the private sector (and they were) because we had "jobs for life" and a very good pension. NEITHER was actually true as I found out in the private sector where total incompetents were earning far in excess of what I had earned in LG for somewhat lesser responsibility.
Had that not been true then they wouldn't have needed to offer me contracts would they?
Even better their pension schemes were better than mine. Of course this was mainly in the financial sector!!!!
Imagine my delight when I discovered last year that the now Liberal controlled Council had had to engage one of the big 5 consultancies (because they no longer had a far cheaper and more effective internal consultancy) at a cost of 10s of millions.
At least a high proportion of the 500 jobs which must now go are the very unnecessary "middle managers" which I had opposed even being created.
The Neigbouring , also Liberal controlled, County Council is having to shed 800 jobs. This is in Labour heartland.
Even worse I actually warned, over 20 years ago, that the Council were sitting on a time bomb re equal pay.I actually used those words to Committee. I was ignored and now the bomb has finally exploded!!! (rather later than I expected but the unions are also incompetent).
Things aren't always what they seem.
Thanks for that Bewick, that was a really worthwhile contribution. I draw a lot from my own experiences in both Local Government and the Civil Service either side of my military career. I cannot believe how the government organisations have changed in attitude and competence over the years. I often wonder how anything ever gets done.
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