Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The magic money tree

The public services and quangos are profligate with taxpayers money, usually under the belief that apart from budget constraints (often ignored) it's a bit of a magic money tree in that somehow or other it will never run out. Not even the usual threat of an incoming government to somehow get control over the nations finances seems to faze them, carefully negotiated deals with golden handshakes and redundancies mean it's usually more trouble than its worth to sack them or remove them, so the spending spree simply carries on...
Mail.
One of Britain’s best-known quangos has spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on redundancies, while hiring more than double the number of staff that it let go, figures reveal.
Information released under Freedom of Information laws shows that Ofcom, the communications watchdog, has spent £9.4million making workers redundant over the past five years.
But over the same period it has hired 598 staff – more than twice the 223 who have been let go.
The 2012/13 budget for Ofcom – which is run by Ed Richards, a former member of Tony Blair’s policy unit, on a salary of almost £400,000 – is £121.4million.
No company in the private sector would behave like this, no company could afford too and there are ways to shed staff by natural wastage, redundancy is only ever used as a last resort. But in the public sector? Well the magic money tree means never having to say we've run out of cash and we can't afford to do this. Yet here we have a publicly financed organisation paying 223 people off whilst taking 598 on. Someone (or some people) are seriously taking the piss here in the sure and certain knowledge that the government will let them get away with it. You can tell pretty much by the sinecure of the head of the 'firm' that this is one of Blair and Labours jobs for the boys where drones and parasites are given large sums of taxpayers cash as a way of looking after them without them having to do anything like what should be required to earn that sort of cash. No head of any taxpayer funded institution be it national or local is worth £400,000 same with chief executives in local government. A ceiling of £100,000 ought to be enough, I'm pretty sure even at that amount they'd be inundated with takers.

4 annotations:

Dioclese said...

Have to disagree. Redundancy in the private sector is largely used as a method of getting rid of people whose faces don't fit or actually have a brain of their own and insist on using it, or union activists.

Or, of course, as a way of giving cronies huge severance payments.

Anonymous said...

Just another example of Freidman's Law.
Penseivat

StourbridgeRantBoy said...

Working-class people in the private sector have their redundancy level or years of admissible service capped unless there is an agreement, no golden handshake for them!

I honestly thought OfCom was just a committee that looked into complaints and overcharging etc i did'nt realise that it had a huge budget and all those staff.....I think that their CEO should be reported to OfTwat.....

Laurie -

banned said...

I'm looking at all those Cutbacked wasters from the public sector being re-employed by their mates in the Third Way chariy sector and compliance industries. Nothing changes.