You can’t get a driving licence, driving test or a passport

[daimbarsatemydogsbone]

So Boris plans to cut 90000 civil service jobs.

How does he think this will help?

The CS workforce in 2016 was the smallest it had been since WW2. Prior to 2010, it numbered nearly 500,000.

What if Boris, or his bosses, don't want us to have driving licenses or passports?

And yet it is the constant 'mistakes' in tax returns that accountants have either made themselves or failed to spot (more likely not interested) that leads to billions of pounds in lost tax a year and the very reason we have HMRC 🤷🏼‍♀️

Absolutely! It’s all smoke and mirrors

And the fact that you moved to the private sector and your wages tripled is exactly why places like the civil service, county councils and the NHS have shit admin staff. People who are able, usually move on to better things, leaving the incompetent ones in a job that might be badly paid but which is hard to be sacked from.

I work in a London teaching hospital. Our lower-grade admin staff are appalling - our outpatient manager “doesn’t really understand computers”, her boss does literally no work unless you stand over him, and her admin team don’t even close out clinics reliably, let alone anything else.

But they are paid NMW, in central London. You are clearly not going to attract highfliers - we had one super-competent manager pre-pandemic, and she went to work for a private hospital after a year, at twice the pay and half the stress. Our senior managers, on a decent salary, are perfectly competent.

iirc, US govt used to have (1940s-60s) a philosophy of paying for the best people. Then new ideas came in that govt should never pinch best people from private sector. That meant public sector had to pay less than private. So... there we are. Public sector (including universities) are training ground for private sector. Then public sector has to compete by offering higher job security (potential sinecures) & better pensions, but now those have been eroded too. What's that leave, proximity to centre of power?

All distorted by insistence that public sector salaries shouldn't compete with private sector.

My new passport arrived this week. Took 3 weeks.

A poorly functioning civil service is a sign of an exceptionally bad employer and poor management - low morale, bullying atmosphere, corrupt leadership. Who would want to return to the office in that case? So the buck stops at Boris Johnson and the Government who set the example for those who carry out the work for them; namely say one thing, do another, have no respect for proper procedure, evade responsibility, and make no real effort to carry out promises you know are not founded in any sense of reality, but just plucked out of the air for the soundbytes. What is the attraction any more of public service? You don’t get paid enough to set higher standards than the fat cats above you, and their standards are in the gutter.

It's not about 'someone' in every workforce being mediocre. It's the scale of mediocrity in public sector including civil service. It's difficult to get rid of slackers due to unionism and all that. I'm an academic and I see mediocre academics who don't turn up lectures, who don't complete marking on time, who don't produce any research outputs, affects team morale, but difficult to get rid of. I've felt that leadership in general is too spineless in the UK

It's difficult to get rid of slackers

What are these slackers in the civil service? What are they doing exactly? What are they supposed to be doing?

We had hell trying to get DS a license. They sent it back twice saying that he hadn't provided ID. He had, photo verified and his birth certificate. He applied in November 21 and may 22 he finally gets it. The knock on effect meant he couldn't open a bank account and therefore lost his first ever job before it started. But yeah, working from homes going really well, really productive.