To wonder why civil service haters don't understand that cutting 10,000 jobs is going to hurt everyone

[Everythingisnumbersnow]

I can't believe Labour is doing what they're doing

I work for the civil service - I work with a lot of people who have been in the department for 30+ years and will happily take redundancy. It won’t be cheap.
Regarding flexi - we don’t really get paid overtime unless prearranged (eg work a Saturday on top of the 5 days). I frequently work through breaks - I have to get in early to stay on top of my workload. I have to submit a flexi sheet to my manager. I moved from the private sector - the civil service get their pound of flesh.

I work in public service.

I would prefer less CS but in doing that making sure that those in post are specialised and experienced in their role.

I meet with too many young ‘policy advisers’, advising on education policy. Other than going to school themselves they really don't have the experience.

It would be much better if the CS policy adviser had actually worked in education.

Yes if people get made redundant they look for another job. We have savings at home

Are you going to put me straight then or just patronise me?

That’s one way to win people over to your viewpoint. It would help if you wrote some context as you say nothing about what this is about.

If you are referring to the end of NHS England, public sector seems quite a loose description as the explainer article I just read said that even previous Conservative ministers had complained that NHS England was preventing them from directly managing the NHS. That fact seems crucial as the Covid enquiry will undoubtedly recommend that for future pandemics there will need to be better ministerial oversight of provisions.

@Everythingisnumbersnow
I'm a former civil servant who took redundancy 18 months ago.
I was in and around the CS and quangos for over 30 years. I've had jobs where I was run off my feet and doing the work of 2 or 3, jobs where I was ticking along nicely - enough to do but not overworked, and jobs where the team was overstaffed. I was most definitely not needed in my last role.
10,000 in an workforce of half a million is not a lot. There will be depts, units, teams where losing staff will be difficult, others really need to think about what they are doing and how to do it more efficiently and effectively and losing a few staff here and there won't make any difference to delivery of services.
What the civil service needs to do is get the right people in the right jobs in the right place. Some depts are better than others at doing that.
It's not like closing a mine, or a large factory in a small town where they are the main employers.
Over the years I've seen multiple rounds of redundancies, I've never known anyone go who didn't want to.

Times are tough, I don't think we can expect the civil service not to take its share of the pain

It’s all well and good cutting jobs in bloated services but what they need is a really good plan in place for what’s going to happen when they have fewer workers. Anyone can save money by slashing the workforce but it’s a false economy if the people you have left are left to pick up the pieces with no clear plan as to how.

I seriously doubt there’s a good plan in place. It’ll be short term gain resulting in longer term pain.

5000 new tax inspectors can tackle the huge growing black economy and help tackle money laundering, modern slavery, etc. The tax authorities should never have been cut so savagely in the first place as it's one area of the public sector that actually generates income by controlling tax evasion, benefit fraud, etc. Bring it on. The last time any of my clients had a proper tax enquiry was over 20 years ago! Prior to that a small business could expect some kind of tax inspector enquiry/visit every few years, sometimes a VAT inspection, sometimes an income tax enquiry, sometimes a PAYE check. All disappeared because of Brown's amalgamation of the different tax departments and then wholesale redundancies of qualified/experienced tax inspectors when local tax offices were closed down. Bring it on. My only comment is that 5,000 isn't enough.

Yes, by "attracting" I did mean offering a competitive rate.

I work in a Govt organisation. We were agile and got stuff done, we were directed to recruit. We are now too slow in our delivery because the additional processes these people bring apparently equals improvement. Fail

Do you remember the good times before Brexit well you voted to come out of it. Deal with it

So funny! You do realise that international tax planning is international. No matter how brilliant you find a tax expert, they'll have no jurisdiction over every different country nor tax haven. They could come up with brilliant ideas, but if the politicians can't persuade Isle of Man, Panama, Switzerland to do the same, it's all a waste of time. Do you really think that governments over the past 20-30 years didn't want to tackle it? In fact, there are international committees trying to tackle it and making slow progress. After all, the only way to "persuade" an island tax haven to give up tax haven status is to bribe them, nuke them or invade them!

Ideally they will cut the poor performers first. In my department you could cut a quarter with no impact on services - poor performers are just shuffled around teams. But I won't be surprised if the process is executed poorly and the opportunity is wasted.

My partner is working for a housing association and they are trying to frustrate people out of there.

I work for an ALB and I agree it’s bloated. Whenever a new activity is launched, the immediate thing is to recruit a load of new people instead of reprioritising exiting resource. Lots of time and money wasted on ‘change’ and ‘transformation’ to reduce bureaucracy and inefficiency that quite obviously just increases both. There is also a big issue with people being on long term sick and it’s practically impossible to get rid of low performers - they just get shifted about.

The issue I have is where the cuts are made. We’ve been through headcount reductions through voluntary exit before and invariably the useful people go get other jobs and the ‘bloat’ sticks around. Also there’s a big difference in cutting high salaried desk jobs compared to frontline staff like prison officers. Not sure I trust that the balance will be right.

You don't even need brilliant accountants to tackle it. Even "bog standard" ones know what works, what doesn't, how people are getting away with things, how the black economy is growing, etc. Many "normal" bog standard accountants working out in small practices in the regions will already be on salaries comparable or less than tax inspectors. Funnily enough, loads of local tax inspectors took their redundancy payments when local tax offices were closed and went to work in local accounting practices doing peoples' tax returns for pretty similar pay levels. There are whole swathes of "average" accountants who'd jump at the chance to work for HMRC and get the benefits of the public sector but only if there were local tax offices as they don't want to relocate to one of the few huge centralised tax centres.

Don't worry OP, you Tories have been complaining for eons that benefits are generous. They'll still have LOADS to spend

The jobs market is not on the floor. We are at 4.4% unemployment which is considered full employment economically, there are over 800,000 jobs available in the U.K.

Losing 10k staff also doesn’t mean 10k are out of a job. These will be a mix of people who want to take voluntary redundancy, and were thinking of leaving anyway, or not filling roles when people retire or move on, and compulsory redundancies.

My only question is where are the jobs going. If it’s the DVLA or DWP then it’s a bad call. But if there are areas which have too many people then that’s a good thing.

Well international companies pay the tax they are legally obliged to pay in the UK according to international tax law. Take google. US company, EU presence in Dublin as Ireland is a tax haven. So all of its services are run out of Dublin. Google UK will be charged a fee roughly the size of its UK revenue by Google in Dublin for these services. Profit in UK minimal. Profit in Dublin big. It’s legal as there are services being provided, and Dublin are charging for the use of the google brand.

The UK can do nothing on their own to address this. They have to work with other countries to solve this. So when people say ‘just tax google etc properly’ they are providing a solution that doesn’t work rather than considering a solution that does work, like increasing the basic rate of income tax, which brings in massive amounts. The usually think like this as they want better public services without having to pay for them themselves.

No... this is pretty ignorant on your part... not sure you realise how investment banks work but this wont cause them to fail, especially considering the buffers that are required following previous crashes, they'll be fine.

Like it or not the CS is not efficient and performance has not been managed effectively on the whole. I know several people who work for the CS and all of them have repeated frustration over people jumping between jobs for pay rises or being moved rather than managed when underperforming it needs to be held accountable. There are thousands of competent workers in the CS and they deserve to work in effective teams.

Might make the tiniest dent in the enormous public sector pension bill the rest of us will be paying until we're dead.

I’m a left of centre civil servant and you’re absolutely wrong.

The bloating of the civil service combined with real terms pay cuts have been awful for the service. You had tens of thousands coming in to do ill defined roles that results in lack of clarity and action dying a death of a thousand clearances, while pay cuts meant many people being promoted before they are ready because it was the only way to get a pay rise.

The drive to make better use of technology, be less cautious and more fit for purpose is absolutely the right one. And those of us who have been frustrated that bloated structures have stopped us from delivering what we need to will welcome it.

As for the wider economic argument - you’re right that the public should support the private. But that has to happen on a macro scale. Employment for employments sake isn’t good economic policy because the costs will almost always outweigh the benefits. So investing in housing, infrastructure and competitiveness means economic benefits beyond just the employment of builders and engineers. That employment is an added bonus, certainly. But economies thrive by producing and selling more - so investing in the capacity of the economy to be more productive makes sense. Spending money just to keep people employed is not good economic policy by itself.

I think this is long overdue. I have worked for NHSE and the civil service. It's bloated, overpaid and inefficient. It's separate to front line NHS workers and often acts as advisory or supervisory roles, ensuring contracts and policy are written and met. They spend years pontificating minor points drafting a policy whilst missing the bigger picture. Invariably they know less than the people that deliver the service they oversee and have to ask them for their help to understand how the service works. Just as they get to the point of either about to publish a policy or know more about their subject area there is a reorganisation which occupies everyone for months on end and no actual work gets done. If frontline performed as well as NHSE do we'd be seeing countless deaths but they'd have lots of meetings and forms to discuss the deaths...

Same. Been a Civil Servant for 12 years and it is shockingly overstaffed and inefficient.

I suppose it depends on how you view it. The idea on here when Labour were getting elected was that they should tax the rich (ie anyone but me).

It was quite rightly pointed out this is unlikely to be successful, and it will be the middle class and small that will end up paying the burden.

Should everyone pay the right amount of tax ? Of course. But inspections can be quite stressful and expensive for business owners, even if all their affairs are 100% in order. It can take significant amounts of time and effort to reply to enquiries and put together the necessary information. Of course you can get insurance to cover some of these costs. But small business owners are still going to have to devote significant amounts of time to it.

What frustrates me is while small business owners will get hit as easy targets, money launderers will simply shut down and disappear, probably to pop up somewhere else in the future. Big business will continue to pay armies of accountants to avoid.

It will be people at the bottom of the commerical enviroment that will end up paying the most as the cost of covering inspections is large in comparison to their revenue. In that respect its pretty similar to benefit snatching, go after the people least able to defend themselves and fight back.