The country is over staffed in the civil servent sector. We could actualy remove half the civil servents and function more better and save a fortune in wages and pensions..

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Suprise suprise I wondered when Andrew would pipe up with his usual tirade. I worked for a local authority for six years and I know the majority were hard working and dedicated and as a matter of fact were not paid a comparable salary. We were subjceted to re-organisation after re-organisation depending on who won an election. As usual people will shout at how much money will be saved by making these people redundant without looking at the bigger picture

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I feel extremely sorry for anyone who loses their job. We can only hope that front-line and customer facing positions will not be hit, but I wouldn’t bet on it. There ARE literally hundreds of very well paid and quite senior ‘non jobs’ in this authority which could be axed with no detrimental effect to the public at all. And while education is always the area that people say should be protected, this is actually the most bloated of the lot, with hundreds employed – including at senior level in schools – with absolutely no teaching involvement whatsoever. Even after allowing for the important admin backup, there are STILL dozens that could be culled.

None the expected job cuts come as a surprise – what amazes me if that the council CONTINUE to advertise many of these non-jobs. How much is it going to cost us to get rid of these people?

My guess is that it’s the front-line staff that the council will get rid of, the ones that are easiest and cheapest(they think) to dispense with. And all the other hangers-on will do just that.

I repeat that anyone working for the council has my sympathy – especially the thousands of hard working people who we rarely hear about but who keep things running. But there is – like with all authorities – hundreds who don’t come anywhere near that job description.

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in the 12 months after gaining the adminstration in telford, the tories increased the wage bill by £6.7 million with the vast majority of that being £50k and above earners, just how many staff have gone since this date that hasn’t been published, lets not forget Telford Firsty, sorry Transforming Telford, sorry its now One Telford.

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Perhaps Andrew Finch could have some sympathy for all those who will lose their jobs because hundreds of council workers lose their spending power.Selfish twit

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I agree with Ian. Project similar figures for councils across the UK – many of them, to be fair, far more overmanned and poorly run than Shropshire – and that is an awful lot of reduced spending power that is going to cause far more lasting damage to the economy. At the same time, councils have been recruiting non jobs like there is no tomorrow. Somewhere – a long time ago – some balance should have been applied. And now, because there hasn’t been, all these people are in danger. Not a very auspicious achievement.

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all the hard working private sector folk who laugh now will realise the boots on the other foot when all their contracts dry up, without the council there will much less business in shropshire for anyone – i hope they protect economic development and tourism promotion at least

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Stuart,

It’s a long-time Tory ploy to pretend that public service numbers are going up when they are not, in order to undermine the public sector, and open the door for more unnecessary privatisations.

I’m happy to correct your statement that the Civil Service has ‘grown like Topsy’. It hasn’t. In fact, by the end of 2008 the number of Civil Servants was 487,000. That’s the lowest figure since 1999. The lowest figure since WWII was just 10,000 less than this at 477,000,(Q1 – 1999) so as you can see, the accusation that Labour has allowed the Civil Service to grow out of control is simply not supported by fact.

To give some context to these numbers, this represents less than 2% of total UK employment. In total, all public sector employees (and don’t forget that includes teachers, doctors, nurses, polce, council workers, local Government officers, and Civil Servants), make up approximately 9% of the workforce – and the numbers of non-Civil Service public sector jobs has also fallen at a similar rate to those in the Civil Service.

You might also be interested to know that only approx 7% of Civil Servants earn more than £45,000. 30% earn less than £20,000. 60% earn less than £25,000. In fact during the period 1997-2008, Civil Service earnings rose significantly more slowly than those in the private sector.

I accept that the Government has cut the amount available to Councils – but if you’d watched the news less selectively, you’d understand that this was as a direct result of the bankers financial crisis. We are all paying the price of the bankers’ greed, and the Tories are itching to use this as a further excuse to apply their anti-public sector dogma, and cut essential services to the bone.

As for the suggestion that the Tories handed over sound finances, I’ll remind you that they handed over an economy based upon the house of cards that was the financial services industry – and we all know what happened to that, don’t we? It was a facade – nothing more.

I make no apology for mentioning Osborne’s underhand scheme to get the banks back to his friends in the private sector as quickly as possible. Our best hope to get our loans to them back with interest is to retain control of them for as long as possible – not to flog them off cheaply as the Tories did with our public utilities back in the ’80s.

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Peter,

No it’s not me with a very selective analysis of the Civil/Public Service staffing levels. neither did I mention anything about “being out of control”. You don’t like facts but it is a fact that those jobs paid by Government or Local authorities have grown by something in the order of 250,000. I don’t intend to argue this point, neither am I in the least concerned in your red herring of Civil Service salaries, they are irrelevant to this issue, unless it is the lower paid “Public” Servants sacked and the higher paid bosses retained, but there is no proof as things stand that this will be the case. Indeed, this article refers to “Public Servants” not “Civil Servants”. They have their bitter pill yet to follow after the election. Neither are percentages relevant, if you are one of those going to lose their job, it really is academic if you are one of 1% or one of 100%, the fact is another person has lost their job and another life devastated. Most of the increased jobs in these services are those with strange sounding names which hitherto never existed but which have been foisted on Councils/Departments to fulfill the Governments own agenda, many of which are concerned with performance review and monitoring. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that these will be the jobs that are lost, the jobs likely to go are those without “strange” sounding names, like Social Workers, Refuse Workers, Clerks etc etc, eg, those in essential jobs that are valued less than some of the daft jobs like “Performance Monitors”, “Equality Evaluation Analysts” and similar. Useless and needless jobs to start with which should never have been recruited, Now, others are to suffer for this folly.
I think that most on these streams are now accustomed to an instinctive rush from you to bring out an instant critique of everything that is associated with capitalism. You continue your effrontery to deny the most blatant facts and twist them to suit your own demented and paranoid hatred of anything that does not conform to your extreme socialist beliefs. The bankers have absolutely nothing to do with the crisis in Local Government, if you check up on the % Government funding to LAs before this crisis in our economy arose, you will find that John Denham and his cronies were already applying the brakes then, some two years ago. The banks at that time were going along quite nicely, no complaints and everything was fine and dandy.
I repeat, Brown is directly responsible for the possible future sacking of anything up to 180,000 public servants (we haven’t heard about the job losses in the Civil Service yet) how you can argue against this fact is stretching even your credibility a little to near the breaking point. No TV news programme, and I selectively watch all, BBC, ITV and Sky have mentioned anything about the “bankers” being responsible for this job loss crisis in Local Government indeed, all three without exception mentioned the fact that the crisis is due to Government reductions in LA funding.
Unless you come out with something similarly outrageous to what you have already said, I do not intend to continue this. Any sensible person can see the stark facts facing them as they have been for the past eighteen months.
We are talking of anything up to 180,000 Local Government workers losing their jobs here (this was a revised figure given on last nights news), that, by any standards is a very serious issue, heartbreaking for those concerned and devastating for the young, the elderly and all others caught up in the after affects of such a reduction in staffing levels.
The bankers (and the Government for allowing them) can be blamed for much with regard to the present economic disaster, they cannot be blamed for a Social Worker or similar losing their job in Telford or Shrewsbury, that is all down to Brown and his gang.

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Stuart,

Frankly, I’m astonished that you have wilfully failed to make the obvious link between the current global financial crisis, and the squeeze on Government spending.

If you had read the rest of the debate more thoroughly, you would see that some contributors had confused the Civil Service with Local Government and other parts of the public sector – I simply explained that the allegation that this sector had grown significantly was untrue. The same is true of the public sector in general – see below about your ’250000′ figure.

The sort of council cuts being proposed will doubtlessly hit front-line services, but bear in mind that by their own admission the Tories would make far deeper ones – so please spare us your crocodile tears over the job losses – don’t forget that your party once said that ‘Unemployment is a price worth paying’. I don’t believe their views on that have changed. They would clearly rather spend our money on expensive privatisations and on giving back the banks to the same people who got them into trouble in the first place, than on investing in our public services.

As for your ’250000 extra jobs’ figure, I note that you decline to offer any evidence to support this myth. Of course, there have been increases in numbers of police officers and NHS staff under Labour, and certainly NHS waiting lists have come down as a result, but these are nothing like of the order of 250000.

Interestingly though, there was an increase of around the 250000 mark in Q4 2008 – this may well be the leap in numbers to which you are referring. Was this caused by the addition of ‘non-jobs’? Or perhaps a new department of Whitehall mandarins? Or even loads of do-gooding social workers? No – none of the above. In fact this leap was caused by the re-classification of a couple of groups of workers from private to public sector – the supreme irony is that these groups were Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group staff, whose jobs had to be taken into the public sector due to the bankers’ recession. So the public sector was increased by 250,000 at a stroke directly due to private sector greed and incompetence. I take it that this fact, supported as it is by evidence from the Office of National Statistics, now makes all accusations of reckless increases in public sector jobs null and void?

Now turning to Andy, whilst your comment is so risible it barely warrants a reply, I will simply state this. I want the banks to fully pay back their debt to the public purse, with interest, before they are allowed to return to private ownership. If a bank lends me or you money, that is just what they would expect. How, precisely, is it ‘communistic’ to follow the same principles as the banks?

Finally, to Craig. Does the Queen pay the police directly? I think not.

They certainly are accountable to the public via their police authorities, and their pay is funded by a levy on Council Tax billing authorities, plus additional grant support from the Home Office. Our Council Tax funds most of the cost of local policing, albeit via the relevant police authority – so now hopefully you understand that the police form a clear part of the public service debate in this context, no matter what they have on their hats.

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Drew, I do not intend to continue arguing with Peter, his mind is utterly closed to facts and all we get is socialist ideology that bears little relevance to the information that intelligent people have and accept.
You yourself make a very good point though, it is something I have mentioned before on these streams and something that I have recently thought more about.
Our country is in a state of total disaster, politically, morally, economically, socially and militarily, indeed there is barely one single aspect of our national psyche and infrastructure that has not been severely harmed by Brown and his party and Blair before him.
Whichever party gains power in the coming elections, they are going to have to inflict radical policies to mend our once great country. I fail to see why any party other than Labour should pick up this mantle of abject failure. They caused the disaster – let them mend it. Let this country see exactly what they have allowed to run amok across every one of our national institutions to an extent that makes Britons ashamed to call themselves Britons. Labour should stand naked and exposed for every man jack of us to see what they are, liars, corrupters, self seekers, traitors and insidious hypocrits to the last one.
Why should any party get the blame for what they have done because that party if it is not Labour who win the election, are going to have to make themselves so unpopular that they will be damned for evermore. This government and it’s record will be mentioned in history along with Blair and his war crimes. The election should be cancelled and it should be given to Labour on a plate. We are over £1.5 TRILLION in debt, can we think of the cuts/savings that have to be made in our Public Services or the taxes that have to be raised, to restore us to balance
On another related point but a rather strange suspicion of mine. 14 months ago, Cameron and the Tories were on the crest of a wave with a large poll advantage over Brown. Cameron was like a ball of fire and he would at that time have won an election by a substantial margin. No one can now argue that the fire and “verve” has now gone. His approach is half-hearted and I detect a “couldn’t care less attitude”. I do not think that is an accident or because of success by Brown, I think that Cameron now realises that if he wins the election, he has been given the most massive poison chalice of all time. I really think that he does not want it and is merely putting on a show for “appearance sake”.
I think they will merely fight to keep their seats and let the election go to Brown. Tell me I am wrong, with a country in this state it is exactly what I would do. In future we run the risk of massive social and public unrest brought about by Labours policies and the Labourites should be made to stand up to this. This country needs a drastic lesson which is long overdue, our proudest institutions have been rubbished and we have allowed it to happen and have done nothing to stop this Government running amok. Now they should face the consequences and managing what lies ahead. Cancel the election and let us say to Labour, over to you, now get us out of it.

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Didn’t think so!

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