Then when the cuts come it’s the more traditional (and necessary) services that suffer. They haven’t grown during the spending round. It’s all the ‘trendy’ new initiatives and talking shops that have sprung up because of pointless legislation and eye-catching PR stunts. If anything all these ‘new’ services (many of them ‘internal’ services) just hamper everyone else, dragging people away from their desks to nonsensical meetings and spamming up everyones inboxes with reams of mindnumbing drivel.

You mention ‘any sensible manager’, in local government? Are you having a laugh? What happens is that the senior management divy up the cuts between the different directorates, the middle managers then divy up their share of cuts between the various services deciding what jobs go. The problem is that most of them are involved in a mad passionate love affair with all their ‘trendy’ new-labour initiatives. They look great on the old CV should some well-paid cushy policy job crop up in the pages of the Guardian one Wednesday.

Yes they cut some of the rubbish out, but although they spout on about ‘not cutting any core services’, that’s exactly what they do. Even though the core services never grew in the spending round they get cut too.

The best way to make public services more efficient would be to ‘cut’ all the pointless legislation off the statute book and scrap all these silly initiative that we’re perminently bombarded with. Then all of the pointless people in the public sector become naturally redundant and everyone will be able to get on with what they were supposed to be doing in the first place.