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These cuts will render my Agency just about impotent on the ground. My team is meant to have 9 people has 5 and we have to lose 1.5 more over the next 4 years. Still expected to do the same amount of work. Lots of people are in the same boat though, musn't grumble 😆
Its plain silly
It saddens me to see a lot of the things that I value about being a citizen of this country being systematically denigrated, destroyed or underfunded to the point they are no longer capable of delivering what they should.
I think that the current Tory party are doing such damage to British society whilst apparently reveling in their ability to do so is appalling.
Still, someone will be along in a minute to say how lucky public sector workers are, don't know they're born, 'work, call that work' etc etc and how we don't need all this state provided stuff like health care anyway as 'hard working families' will, somehow, save the day.
Started the year with 10 in our team. Two experienced staff quit for part time pub and shop work. Two are off long term sick. Leaves 6 people to do the work and train up four recent starters.
Cuts will really start to bite across the public sector, corners cut, service and safety compromised, new legislation in our area seems designed to get round the problems the cuts have caused rather than benefit what we should be doing.
There still areas we could be more efficient, I'm sure, but when you are up to your arse in alligators.....
How many people in the private sector are earning the same as they were 10 years ago? Not in relative terms, but the same amount of take home?
All while doing more work, with less people and longer hours.......
Not many, I reckon......oh, and my pension has also been decimated.
Is this 30% the overall cut?
If it is then a lot of areas will see much higher percentage loss of income as some services are 'protected' and only seeing reduction in funding by level of inflation.
Is this 30% the overall cut?
According to R4 it's day to day running costs rather than cap-ex, so things like the department of transport with a large capital spend aren't quite as affected as the headline figure suggests.
No comfort for the people working in such departments though.
My take home has gone up £35 a month since 2008. Good job prices have been stable over that time. Oh, wait.... And as an EO my pay is still below the average wage. And below the benefit cap staff at a lower grade administer.
And I know private sector has had similar issues. But none of my private sector friends have been told they have another 4 years of this to go through.
Two weeks time MrsMC and I job swap. She goes full time, I go part time. We'll have more money and better work/life balance. No brained.
My take home has gone up £35 a month since 2008
Show off! Mines gone down since 2009 😀
You had to go there, didn't you? You had to respond so that a legitimate moan about your work in the public sector turned into a public vs private battle.....
Painful but not unexpected.
Austerity George was light on austerity (sic) in the Coalition and planned more aggressive cuts during this term. The ring-fencing of certain department meant that 30-40% cuts elsewhere were inevitable.
Still labour market trends - employment and wages - all going in a better direction although public sector wages are lagging the private sector in this recovery. so hardly a destruction scenario...
Will they keep going in the right direction after these cuts? Its a massive gamble.
race to the bottom...unless you are an MP
Identify savings whilst maintaining acceptable performance and implement = sensible.
Implement savings and then firefight = reductions in capacity and performance that may never be recovered.
musn't grumble
Why not? How will things change if you just keep taking it?
so hardly a destruction scenario...
Depends what you mean by destructive.All those cuts means the government won't be able to do things it did previusly. They are aiming for fundamental change in the relationship between state and nation.
Might be a good idea if you see yourself as a landed Tory squire but for most of us proles it is probably bad news.
You have to ask yourself, what sort of a country do you want to live in?
https://m.facebook.com/Hampshire-Risk-review-and-you-1489581798019630/
Cuts on the back of cuts are about to destroy Hampshire fire and rescue, make no bones about it residents of Hampshire will be left at a far greater risk.
No matter what 'spin' the dep chief looks to put on it.
how we don't need all this state provided stuff like health care
Would that be the health care that is not being cut and indeed gets more money each year ?
[url= http://election2015.ifs.org.uk/nhs-spending ]http://election2015.ifs.org.uk/nhs-spending[/url]
Still they cut, cut, cut rather than going after the big corporate tax dodgders, non-doms, etc.
rather than going after the big corporate tax dodgders
The big corporate tax dodgers can afford better lawyers than the government.
And it'll be made worse after all these cuts!
Might be a useful thread to bring up this:
[url= https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/104471 ]No confidence vote[/url]
Not that I think it will make any difference - I doubt it will even get debated. But the more that keep signing the less likely it will go away.
I think if it reaches a million it has to be debated.
What I don't get is the focus on opex, but capex is fine (and from what I can see increasing) What this means in reality is more and more money spent with firms and contractors who keep increasing rates and fewer and fewer competent perm staff to manage them and hold them to account, an overall net of leaking public money like a sieve.
Sure no one likes cuts, much as like when we were kids being told we couldn't go on holiday abroad this year because my folks were struggling to pay the mortgage. But can't see what the alternative is? To keep borrowing to fund increasing public service, continue spending more than we earn and bankrupting the country - oh wait nearly been there.
It's not that different in the private sector. We're getting so lean and agile we are positively undernourished. I wonder when someone will realise that continually reducing "back office" support functions seriously impacts on the ability of A business to do its job (i.e. provide services and make a profit).
Employed people have money in their pockets to put back into the economy.
Sure no one likes cuts, much as like when we were kids being told we couldn't go on holiday abroad this year because my folks were struggling to pay the mortgage
As has been pointed out endless times, national economies don't work like household finances. If the analogy were accurate, your pay packet would be influenced by how much you spend at Tesco's.
What I don't get is the focus on opex, but capex is fine
Politics isn't it, Labour can't grumble at the Tories as they want to increase CAPEX spending. Plus cutting 2 heads across every organisation has little news impact against cutting a £5 Billion project.
I agree it seems slightly daft to me, should be balanced between CAPEX and OPEX.
[i]To keep borrowing to fund increasing public service, continue spending more than we earn and bankrupting the country[/i]
Debt = Money.
If governments stop spending "the" money (raised either through taxation or borrowing at lower interests rates than you can) then it forces the people to fund spending "the" money as a greater portion of their wages, or borrowing at higher rates than govts.
which will make use poorer.
[i]Started the year with 10 in our team. Two experienced staff quit for part time pub and shop work. Two are off long term sick. Leaves 6 people to do the work and train up four recent starters.[/i]
So you started with 10, and now you've 12 - that looks like a 20% increase?
10 - 2 + 4 = 12
The 2 off sick still cost.
[i]What I don't get is the focus on opex, but capex is fine[/i]
When cashflow is crap, you need to reduce OPEX.
I was talking to somebody who works in mental health care. They had 25% cut last year, 25% this year, and another cut is lined up for next year.
This means they simply don't have the resources to do their job properly, so instead of keeping people at home with a little bit of extra support, now they have to go into full time care which is far more expensive.
Penny wise and pound foolish 👿
I understand about reducing operational expenses, but what they are actually doing is transferring the same tasks to private firms/contractors who the charge multiple times more than it would cost to manage internally. The actual "service" is still there, and now you are paying vastly more for it, but you can claim it is capex, so that is okay. Overall though the cost of the same "service" has now increased year on year, and you'll have the expense of re tendering every 5 years.
Maybe my rudimentary understanding of accountancy is why I don't get it....surely to save money you have to actually cut the service rather than transfer it to a private firm and pay more for it?
Why not? How will things change if you just keep taking it?
+1, if you don't grumble everyone assumes it's all ok!
Its plain silly
For Labour to have allowed the deficit to grow as they did and not to have cut spending. It cost them the 2010 and 2015 elections.
Government spending is far too high versus income, something has to change. The electorate wanted education protected and nhs spending increased, so bigger cuts elsewhere.
I'd be in favour of higher taxes, starting with copying the rest of Europe and adding a lower rate of VAT on food. Our taxes are too low vs the government spending we'd like but people won't vote for that. I'd also abolish all the corporate tax deals with Luxembourg and Ireland etc but we'd have to leave the EU first.
If governments stop spending "the" money (raised either through taxation or borrowing at lower interests rates than you can) then it forces the people to fund spending "the" money as a greater portion of their wages, or borrowing at higher rates than govts.
The government doesn't raise money from taxation or borrowing for spending. It creates all money as all our debt is GBP and the sole source of GBP is the UK government. Any funding limits are purely self imposed by the government.
There may be knock of effects in terms of inflation and the value of the pound but these are policy decisions and nothing to do with taxation and government borrowing/spending
Taxation and spending cuts are political policy decisions not a necessity to raise money - usually to help control interest rates - the target of which is a government self imposed policy.
The Tory mantra of the country being like a company or household is totally wrong as the UK cannot default on any of it's debt and thus be made bankrupt. Unlike Euro countries that have debt in a non-sovereign currency.
s has been pointed out endless times, national economies don't work like household finances. If the analogy were accurate, your pay packet would be influenced by how much you spend at Tesco's.
Not if you used your credit card to take up the slack, you absolutely can make comparison between national economies and household finances. We've run the national credit card up close to a dangerous level where we risk the interest charge running out of control if/when interest rates rise also of course the risk that we're told we are at max credit.
Greece just kept spending and bribing the electorate with ever more handouts, then the music stopped and the markets declined to lend any more money. Choices where an eu bailout or a default, two very unpleasant choices.
@Dave, you are sadly very much mistaken about potential economic pain. We can't just keep printing money to service our debt, not without creating rampant inflation and massive currency devaluation which would likely bankrupt many of our companies and plunge us all into poverty as imports became much more expensive (eg oil, food, cars, clothes). Why would international investors buy ever increasing amounts of uk debt when it's denominated in a currency in free fall ? So interest rates jump up massively (thus bankrupting businesses and mortgage holders) and the government debt becomes unserviceable as tax revenues plumit
every government dept I've dealt with or worked in could comfortably lose 30% of staff and still finish early on a friday.
its why I left the civil service.
For Labour to have allowed the deficit to grow as they did and not to have cut spending.
It was pretty modest up until the 2008 crash e.g. less than under the Tories in the early 90s. It only went tits up when all the banks crashed. Post 2008 crash if they'd slashed spending, to reduce the deficit, we'd have gone into full scale depression and possibly total financial meltdown (if they'd let all the banks collapse rather than bailing them out).
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I'd be in favour of higher taxes, starting with copying the rest of Europe and adding a lower rate of VAT on food. Our taxes are too low vs the government spending we'd like but people won't vote for that. I'd also abolish all the corporate tax deals with Luxembourg and Ireland etc but we'd have to leave the EU first.
Except adding VAT to food just makes it worse for those at the bottom. Regressive taxation is not the answer.
@Dave, you are sadly very much mistaken about potential economic pain.
I was only stating the misunderstanding that taxes/borrowing are used to fund spending. They aren't. The government doesn't need this money to spend.
And we haven't reached a credit limit - There is no-one asking for the money back as it's all GBP that is created by ourselves. This is where saying it's like a household is incorrect.
And we have the choice of increasing interest rates - a key choice that Greece didn't have. Saying "rampant inflation and massive currency devaluation" are scaremongering as inflation can be very useful for growing economies.
There are consequences of higher interest rates but it's all policy - self imposed objectives. There is no need to have such austerity and make the policy decisions that the Conservatives have and they use analogies that are incorrect to try and justify them.
Except adding VAT to food just makes it worse for those at the bottom. Regressive taxation is not the answer.
@squirrel I understand that point and it's politically / electorally impossible but we don't raise enough in tax given our aspirations for spending. Pretty much everywhere else in Europe has 8-10% VAT on food. "Tax the rich" and "corporate tax avoidance" are both pots of gold at the end of rainbows. They won't close the gap to meet people's aspirations
There is no-one asking for the money back as it's all GBP that is created by ourselves. This is where saying it's like a household is incorrect.
Apologies if this is a bit simplistic. I've been a bond investor for 30 years, I expect my money back every few years and then decide at that point whether to reinvest. As for creating more pounds to pay debt see my point about currency and inflation. A large part of our national debt is funded by foreigners who don't want devaluing assets and British investors aren't daft and it would make more sense for them to buy debt in - say - euros, Swiss franc or dollars if the pound is in free fall. It's absolutely wrong to assume the government can just print money to pay an ever increasing debt burden with no serious negative consequences
We've just had a 28% cut in our production workforce announced, after an 18% cut in August.
That's private sector.
Woo hoo.
It's absolutely wrong to assume the government can just print money to pay an ever increasing debt burden with no serious negative consequences
What was quantitive easing all about then?
The cost of financing the National Debt, is again, quite modest by recent standards. Hence all this austerity nonsense is a choice rather than a necessity.
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My team is meant to have 9 people has 5
so a 30% cut would leave you with six, non?