Mar 15 2007
One cheer for Gordon
The latest figures for public sector employment show a welcome decline - 22,000 fewer in the last quarter of 2006. There needs to be steady pressure to reduce the numbers of administrative jobs, and to cut out unnecessary functions and initiiatives, to start to get a grip on the deficit and on public spending.
The overall totals are still 750,000 higher than in 1997. The pity is the failure to find jobs for well trained doctors and nurses. We need to reduce the totals in the public sector by a large number, but not by skimping?? much needed medical staff.
??The motto should be more medical consultants, fewer management consultants. The government seems to be getting it?? the wrong way round. There is a huge army of advisory and publicity staff, the??unloved unelected regional governments, people planning the ID card and so many others that we need to tackle.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
How much trust can we put into this figure of 22,000? How many of these people have been shifted to quangos, contractors, and charities to hide to true size of the state?
As for the NHS, until we stop central pay bargaining and get rid of the BMA’s monopoly this farce will continue.
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Highly unlikely. I seem to recall that when El Gordo started his demands for cutting in staff in the public sectors, half the departments ignored it and the other half started gerrymandering.
Also ; what are the chances of the quangos/bureaucrats cutting admin staff - they never do. Cuts are passed straight down the line to the people who actually do useful work.
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JR: “The latest figures for public sector employment show a welcome decline.”
Ha! What about those in Quangos on short term contracts or temping. It you take all of them together, I am prepared to bet you will find that the number of folk working for the government has increased.
No cheers for Gordon Brown, he has single handedly destroyed what was once a reasonably solvent private pensions sector in the UK, he sold off the british gold reserves at a time when the price of gold was at an all time low, it is now at an all time high. And he has funded a huge increase in expenditure on the helth service the result being an explosion in management consultants, a health service where junior doctors can not get a job, because of one disfunctional IT project, another failing IT project the stupid National program for IT. I could go on but my GP has warned me about my blood presure.
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This is not necessarily good news without the details. Sometimes cutting jobs for the sake of it reduces effeciency. I’ll believe this is good news when I see whose jobs have been cut and why the loss of their jobs is a good thing. It is a terrible indictment of Brown and co if they were employing 22,000 unnecessary people. It’s usually not unnecessary people whose jobs go - it’ll be tax evasion officers who actually earn their keep, or some such. In any case, the figures probably include some people who are still employed in the public sector one way or another and suchlike - this number is meangingless. It’s like immigration targets - in order to repatriate enough immigrants for the statistics for the Sun and co, they don’t find the illegal immigrants who’ve got through, they throw out some people with credible reasons to be here, law abiding people with families who’ve gone through the proper processes.
Cancelling the disastrous above-mentioned NHS IT program would be a money-saver I’d be happier to see. A pity it’s too late to cancel the Olympics (which I opposed on cost grounds in the first place).
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