Last Sunday I came across a gem of a job advertisement for HM Customs and Revenue and we discovered that as taxpayers, we are in fact “customers”, and the job of directing this happy enterprise went with a six-figure salary and no doubt, a final-salary pension. Ever since I have been tracking job ads in the public sector, and this weekend, I have another little cracker for you via the Sunday Times:
“A new era for adult social care services.”
A new era. Hold on to your wallets folks.
Director of adult services.
What, is this a porn company?
Up to 110,000 pounds.
Yowza!
Newcastle, recently designated a “science city” by the government, is a great city which in recent years has been transformed into one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the country”.
True. No longer famed for shipbuilding, Newcastle has been through a terrible economic time, but it has some top-class firms, like Sage, the accounting software business. The beer is good and cheap, and the local boys and girls amaze by their ability to go out on a wintry Friday night wearing hardly any clothes. Oh, and it has Newcastle FC, which last won a trophy back in the early Jurassic period.
Our population is ageing and changing – we need to plan for this now. It is critical that organisations across the city work together to better plan for and provide for these changing needs.
No. What the state needs to do is to withdraw from many activities and let people increasingly take control of their own lives and save up money to deal with rising longevity. This process was made rather harder by the present Labour government’s endless fiddling with the tax system, and most of all, its 5 billion-pound-a-year tax raid on corporate pension funds.
In other words, the job spec. here is for some head honcho to “co-ordinate” various efforts to confront the “problems” of a greying population. It seems to me that all this co-ordination will do will cost a lot of money for jobs like this one. People are living for longer – which is hardly a problem from many points of view. As people live longer and healthier lives, then job patterns would, in a free and unfettered market, adjust to deal with that.
£110,000 (US $214,000) is a very nice payout for a lot of bureaucratic hot air. If one multiplies such jobs, you can see why the increase in public sector jobs of more than 800,000 since 1997 has had no noticeable impact on the quality of public services in this country, and arguably, made them far worse.
It’s Newcastle United FC, you, you Mackem!
Let’s not talk about NUFC’s form since 1969. Please!
One of Newcastle’s biggest problems is the proportion of the work-force employed doing pointless jobs by HMG. The colossal Nico offices at Longbenton keep people in (mainly crap) jobs admittedly but they do nothing for the overall Geordie economy. And then there is the truly demented Rural Payments Agency on the site of Lord Armstrong’s former plant. It’s really pathetic what HMG has done to the previously entrepreneurial Geordies who (let’s not forget) built the industrial age. The Tyne valley was the Silicon Valley of the Nineteenth Century.
You’re right about Sage (a great outfit) and possibly one of the reasons that Geordieland’s much vaunted recent redevelopment can boast one gem (The Sage concert hall) amongst a collection of white elephants such as the International Centre for Life and The Baltic and a sodding pedestrian bridge that cost 23 million quid!)
BTW, I don’t like the look of The Sage, but it does the job excellently and it’s nice that the Northern Symphonia has a permanent home.
I’m no fan of the Lib-Dems but I was glad they took Newcastle council because nobody could conceivably do a worse job than Labour who were running the place with a level of graft, corruption, idiocy and sheer incompetence which would have made T Dan Smith blush.
Not as high paying but still symptomatic of the use of tax payer money.
Step 1: Take the job.
Step 2: SABOTAGE!!!
Step 3: Blame someone else.
Step 4: Effectively end the program
Step 5: Emerge as hero.
Step 6: Get elected to higher office
Step 7: Repeat
In the end, as PM, with a tear in your eye, sadly put to rest the last vestige of socialism. You’ll have to lie for years, pretending to be all for these stupid programs, but it’s for a good cause.
Nick, sorry to have missed the United bit. Is there a rival club up there I have not heard of?
I went to Newcastle many years ago and had a fabulous time. More recently, I went to a friend’s wedding just outside the city and also enjoyed myself. The surrounding countryside is well worth a visit.
But on the serious point, I read that in some of these great industrial towns, more than one in three people work for some sort of state-paid job or in a sector where the state is the major customer. This is Labour’s client base and it continues to expand, if not at quite the breakneck pace of the last 10 years. Unless the Tories can figure out a way to roll this back, they will make no real dent in the huge rises in public spending over the past decade. I suspect they know this, but Cameron of course prefers not to confront it.
Jonathan,
Yup. Newcastle is an appalling pork barrel. The problem is that shutting a lot of this stuff down will cause temporary pain for a lot of people. Nico has no excuse for existing because National Insurance hasn’t got an excuse for existing. Cameron won’t confront it. Has Dave ever confronted anything tough?
£110,000 for a director of Adult (social) Services… the poor underpaid mite. The Director of Adult services I work for earns a goodly sum more than that!
The bit you’ve missed, is why the advert? Well last year the government made all Social Services departments split into Children’s and Adult’s services. So now every local authority in England and Wales is employing new directors, new assistant directors etc. Oh, and of course some ‘liason officers’ to make sure everybody works well together.
I, by the way, quite agree about the title: I have to answer the phone at work with a cheery ‘Hello, Adult Services’. God only knows what my bank manager thought when he rang the other day.
Good posting Johnathan.
Yes indeed the government was vastly bloated in 1997 (this was under John “we have spent more money than Labour promised to spend” Major) and the Labour party has added 800, 000 extra staff since then.
Many of these people in their nonjobs get paid a fortune.
“But we have reformed the system – public servants must work hard now”.
In reality this means writing endless reports and comming out with P.C. nonsense.
Back in 1997 the Civil Service was a matter of turning up at 9a.m. chatting with one’s friends till “morning trolly” (the lady with the tea, cake and buns who rang a bell to let people know it was time to stop chatting and eat something) then there was lunch, and “afternoon trolly” and then home at 5p.m.
These days there is indeed a lot of “work” – but the public is no better off for all this activity (rather the reverse).
The civil service is full of “stess” these days (lots of threats, shouting and so on), this is what the power-that-be think of as “making the public servants really serve the public”, but it is not how a successful organization tends to operate.
Also everything is so political now “government has to be political” – then how come (before 1997) no one considered it the job of Civil Servants to support the ruling party? Even Treasury Blue Books are now fully of glossy pictures about such-and-such people have benefitted from New Labour. Every report that comes out of the Civil Service is all about how things have improved since 1997 and will improve further in future.
As for local government. The rot really got out of control when Town Clerks became “Chief Executives” with “Deputy Chief Executives”.
As councillors become less effective (and more under the thumb of central government) so paper work has INCREASED.
I suppose now there is no real indepedence at local level the paper work (reports and so on) are a sort of displacement activity.
David Cameron – well we know what he is (his people told us) “the New Blair”.
God help us.
First, Johnathon, it’s not just corporate pension plans that have been raided – it applies equally to all private pensions, including those of the self-employed.
My local council (Tory) now proudly boasts that it employs a “Work-Life Balance Officer” whose job it is to go around advising private sector employers in the area how better to manage this sensitive subject, supposedly to their own advantage.
I rather imagine that everbody in my area could enjoy a better work-life balance if they weren’t taxed to pay for this type of non-job, which supposedly exists on their behalf.
They’ve just announced that my £2,100 p.a. (and no I’m not even in the top band) council tax will be increasing by 3.2% in April.
HJHJ, I think we had this argument before. Yes, this government has squeezed long-term savings of all kinds. The impact on final-salary pensions has been acute, however, because any deficits are treated like debt on company balance sheets. As a result, and due to the impact of the new regulations, many firms have either shut their schemes to new staff or in some cases, closed them down entirely.
Other pension types are also affected, but the impact on final-salary ones is the most dramatic.
What is sickening is that the final-salary pensions of people have been raided to fund vacuous jobs like this one which have final salary pensions. The larceny involved is breathtaking in its cheek. I honestly do not know how Gordon Brown and his acolytes sleep at night.
Paul
It is worse than you think; the 800,000 (I read a round million a while ago) new jobs are net of those transferred off balance sheet to private sector firms like Capita, EDS, various PFI “partners” etc.
I’ve no idea what the true (gross) increase in the public payroll is under Blair & Brown, but I would aim at double the quoted figure. That’s 1.6m+ un(der)employed off the register, and on the payroll vote.
Add these back to official unemployment, and Prudence Brown is Chancellor with getting on for four million unemployed.
Labour isn’t working! (Haven’t I heard that before somewhere, when there used to be a Conservative party?)
Ah Capita – one of the most disgusting companies in Britain.
It is interesting how governments attract the worst private companies – they seem to get on well.
Of course Capita also gave a lot of money to the Labour party.
As for the “I.T.” projects and the “public-private partnerships” and “P.F.I.” loan deals (“we will pay for X and you pay us many times what it would have cost you – accept you pay over a number of years” rather like a perverted sort of H.P. agreement) – well they fit into the lefts view of businessmen as greedy and corrupt.
Of course (as pointed out above) it is greedy and corrupt businessmen who seem to get on with governments.
The “Conservatives”:
They support all of the above antics by “New Labour” – at least as far as I can make out they support them (it is difficult to make any sense of what they say or write).
I should point out that there is more to PFI than an overpriced loan; the contract is usually for design, build and x year’s maintenance. This can be used to justify some of the price, but it also means that building maintenance staff who would once have been on the government payroll, are now employed by the PFI partner, still doing the same job. Thus the public payroll goes down (or rather the true increase is hidden) but the same jobs are done by the same people.
It is in this environment that the number of government employees has risen by between 800,000 and one million.
The Conservatives will change nothing; for only ten years have they been measurably different from labour in my lifetime. Heath failed to even try to reverse Wilson’s expansion of the intrusive state, Major not only failed to continue the good work but actually undid some of the good done by Thatcher(!); Cameron will be Heath to Blair/Brown as Wilson/Callaghan. UKIP Talk the talk, but it remains to be seen whether they could walk the walk, even if given the opportunity.