Council Jobs to Go -10% Staff Saving Needed

macaque_2

I seem to have chanced upon a nest of public service workers

beingjdc;16714677]Largely because the largest slices of the Council spending cake are schools (for which the Government has mandated big increases) and old people (who are growing rapidly in number as society ages).

Sadly education is one of the public services to have suffered. The amount that the local councils skim off the education budget is also deeply worrying.

The average local government pensioner currently receives a pension of approximately £80 a week.

Clearly the art of spin has in endemic in the public services. There are huge numbers of people who have done short stints in public service and get small pensions as result. This brings down the average dramatically. The reality is that retired full time public sector employees are the fat cats of the pension world and are almost bancrupting some local councils.

Because from Thatcher onwards the public sector has been forced to outsource its basic jobs to the private sector. So the top managers are still public sector employees, but the bin men, security guards, and cleaners work in the private sector, even though they're cleaning schools and security guarding hospitals. Obviously that will push the average up, but it's meaningless.

How can a director of child services be worth £150K. Its ridiculous. In the private sector a person in that sort role would be paid £35k. They just have their snouts in the trough.

Frankly if I was going to be held to account in the national tabloids for a mother and her boyfriend's decision to murder their baby, I'd want quite a lot of media training. I also note that Haringey have significantly increased what they're prepared to pay their next Director of Children's Services. I'm not surprised - they want the best, and nobody's going to take it on because it's a low-stress job in a nice part of the world.

Only another public servant would be so brazen as to defend Haringey's grotesque record.

olly300

macaque wrote: »

I seem to have chanced upon a nest of public service workers

I'm not one of them.

macaque wrote: »

Sadly education is one of the public services to have suffered. The amount that the local councils skim off the budget is also deeply worrying.



Clearly the art of spin has in endemic in the public services. There are huge numbers of people who have done short stints in public service and get small pensions as result. This brings down the average dramatically. The reality is that retired full time public sector employees are the fat cats of the pension world and are almost bancrupting some local councils.

Not even done a short stint.

macaque wrote: »

How can a director of child services be worth £150K. Its ridiculous. In the private sector a person in that sort role would be paid £35k. They just have their snouts in the trough.

Actually in the private sector they would pay that person more. It's the people underneath who would get paid nothing and would do all the work. You obviously aren't aware of what private sector jobs pay and how companies are organised.

macaque wrote: »

Only another public servant would be so brazen as to defend Haringey's grotesque record.

Are you being deliberately nasty? Haringey social services have a poor record however there are social workers in other areas who are making as equally as poor decisions. Luckily for them the people in the other agencies involved i.e. doctors do their work properly so they don't make headlines.

username2003

macaque

education skimming: Either provides examples of sucjh skimming with a detailed breakdown and how this money is in fact wasted rather than usefully used elsewhere - or stop making stupid unsubstantiated comments.

Dir of children services: explain how what they do is only worth £30k in the private sector with a detailed breakdown of relevant roles and responsibilities in your examples - or shut up

Honestly I am sick and tired of people coming on shouting the odds making outlandish comments with no evidence to back it up.

Davesnave

olly300 wrote: »

Aren't class sizes linked to birth rate and the number of immigrants coming in with school aged children?

They should be, but equally they can be modified to fit with whatever the government & pundits of the day deem desirable or necessary. Everything depends upon the teaching and learning styles adopted, though physical constraints, like the size of classrooms, also matter.

Britain already has some of the largest class sizes in the developed world, so I'd guess we wouldn't wish them to increase, but a severe recession, (or depression) could put the nation on almost a war footing, forcing economies of scale into every area where public money is spent.

Japan, has some of the largest class sizes, yet they still produce very competent, motivated students. Brits tend to value individualism and, in an ideal world, I'd favour that approach, but our education, like everything else, will most likely reflect the future we live in, which may be far from ideal.

treliac

Haringey is a particularly deprived area, although not alone in this, as we all know.

The issues are so much wider than can be directed at one team of staff (and I'm not exonerating poor practice by any means) but, as we should all know too, society needs its scapegoats for the problems it cannot accept or solve.

nickmason

nickmason wrote: »

So spare a thought for the local council workers; they aren't any more safe than any other worker.

Also - remember that for a lot of private sector employees - obviously not all - you can save your job by working harder. It's tough, but it can be done; longer hours spent selling or producing can make up for an arid marketplace.

For public sector workers, there's nothing they can do.

Don't get me wrong, I am unhappy about a bloated state, and I think the private sector is broadly a much tougher employer than the public sector, but I know how corrosive powerlessness is, and in bad terms, being a public sector employee is particularly powerless.

What view will the Unions take on all this? Interesting re the Corus 10% pay cut....

Gorgeous_George

The people who murdered baby P were not employed by the Council.

No amount of funding will stop 100% of these dreadful events from happening.

Those who fail to pay their Council tax are partly responsible.

Those who play the system, wasting scarce resources, are partly responsible.

If Haringey had diverted resources to baby P, would that have left some other child short of the care that they needed.

You only hear of the 'mistakes'. The thousands of children saved do not make the news.

GG

beingjdc

macaque wrote: »

Sadly education is one of the public services to have suffered. The amount that the local councils skim off the education budget is also deeply worrying.

With this one paragraph, you have managed to prove that you don't have the faintest what you're talking about. Well done. The amount Councils can take out of the education budget is limited by law, and it's very small.

In fact having been a school governor I can say that many schools wish Councils took more, and provided more, rather than taking less and expecting schools to do things that aren't their core business. It makes far more sense for Councils to arrange school buses, school nurse visits, buildings insurance, special needs support, admissions, musical instrument lessons, and so on than it does to expect each school to do that for themselves.

Clearly the art of spin has in endemic in the public services. There are huge numbers of people who have done short stints in public service and get small pensions as result. This brings down the average dramatically. The reality is that retired full time public sector employees are the fat cats of the pension world and are almost bancrupting some local councils.

Again, given that the Council pension scheme is a funded one, that's actually logically impossible. There may be situations (such as my example about sharing Chief Executives) where it's more financially efficient to offer someone in their late 50s early retirement than it is to go through the process of making them redundant (equally with a large pay-off), but that's far from ordinary.

The employee contribution at the top end is 7.5%, so they're also paying in quite substantial amounts while they work. I'm opted out because I don't believe the scheme will survive until I reach retirement age, but that's more because of stock-markets and our relative decline than anything else.

How can a director of child services be worth £150K. Its ridiculous. In the private sector a person in that sort role would be paid £35k. They just have their snouts in the trough.

Rubbish. The Director of Children's Services in Haringey is in charge of a gross annual revenue budget of £400m, and a substantial capital budget, quite apart from the level of responsibility for, you know, life or death decisions. Find me someone in the private sector who controls a budget of half a billion pounds and is paid £35k.

You are suggesting that someone at the top of their career in an extremely stressful and complex job should expect to be paid 10% less than a graduate trainee at a large London law firm. Do you think that's realistic?

Only another public servant would be so brazen as to defend Haringey's grotesque record.

I didn't defend their record, I said their Director of Children's Services was held to account for someone else's decision to commit murder, by people of whom as far as I am aware only a tiny percentage have taken the trouble to look into the details of the case - I have yet to find anyone prepared to have a detailed discussion of the relative failings of the family, the foster carers, the community, the social workers, the social workers' management, the system, the police, healthcare services, the last doctor to examine Baby P, the prosecution service, and the lawyers.

It's all just heaped entirely on a small number of people at the Council, notwithstanding that they are highly constrained in how they operate by firstly Goverment targets and guidelines, and secondly serious budget constraints. I'm happy to have this conversation in detail if you like, it's an area I know quite a lot about - though not a job I'd take on for £300k, never mind £150k, I'd never be able to sleep at night knowing what could happen if I get something wrong.

LittleMissAspie

macaque wrote: »

I seem to have chanced upon a nest of public service workers

Or maybe the quieter ones of us are just sick of the constant public-sector bashing that goes on here and in other forums.

macaque wrote: »

Sadly education is one of the public services to have suffered. The amount that the local councils skim off the education budget is also deeply worrying.

Humour me and imagine this. You're in charge of a council and you're £2,000,000 short for the year. What do you cut down on?

macaque wrote: »

How can a director of child services be worth £150K. Its ridiculous. In the private sector a person in that sort role would be paid £35k.

Can you show me a job role in the private sector that is comparable with a child services director? If I've got the level right, that woman in Haringey who got sacked was responsible for the education and social care of thousands (well I don't know how big Haringey is but it is thousands at my council) of children. Including fostering and adoption, disabled children and youth offending services.

You can advertise that job at 35k if you like, but I can't see anybody applying.

beingjdc

LittleMissAspie wrote: »

Can you show me a job role in the private sector that is comparable with a child services director? If I've got the level right, that woman in Haringey who got sacked was responsible for the education and social care of thousands (well I don't know how big Haringey is but it is thousands at my council) of children.

Population of Haringey is slightly over 200,000. Of those, around a quarter are under 18.

So she was ultimately responsible for up to about 50,000 children. Even if only 2% were at risk of being abused, we're still up to the 1,000 mark.

And yes, it's a Director level job, so it's the next layer down from Chief Executive of the whole organisation.

Yet apparently they could recruit someone capable for less than a good graduate starting salary. Sure they could...