Digby Jones - Civil service could have half the staff.

lbell_3

lynzpower wrote: »

I think I have given some examples where this simply isnt true. My sister and I were both refused legitimate expenses.

My OH makes 8.50 an hour working for the state, do yo uthink this is a high wage in inner london ?

When I was working at ofsted I was offered to applty fopr the permanent job ( i was temping) and it paid 12.5k

I do not think this is a high wage.

MPs, having thier houses redcorated, having thier living costs covered *isnt that what salaries are for* I can see is unacceptable. Having personalised number plates is unacceptable.

Do you in the private sector have an amnesty on stationary- and no more to be bought till April- so bring in pens from home? ( ie months away) do you in private sector have to buy own tea bags for work and bring them in? Have you ever had something like a Xmas party put on for you ( i have in private sector- we did not have Xmas parties in ublic, although some of us organised to go out for a meal which we paid for ourselves)

The fact is most civil servants & LG employees are not highly paid.

Couldn't agree more; people making sweeping statements about civil servants whilst seemingly forgetting what a large variety of jobs that covers - jobs for not a lot of pay. Yes senior civil servants are able to earn unjustifiable high amounts of money, and there are some absurd high paying jobs available (Equality and Diversity Officer, etc) but the majority of staff are those on the front line who get very little monetary reward, eg job centre staff, court administration staff.

Cuts are being made, but they are being made on the front line. Where I work our jobs are safe, but no-one is being replaced when they leave even though the workload is increasing substantially.

I for one enjoy working in the civil service because of the public contact, job security, and the fact that I work with some great people, but I am certainly not in it for the money!

harry_w

lynzpower wrote: »

...MPs, having thier houses redcorated, having thier living costs covered *isnt that what salaries are for* I can see is unacceptable. Having personalised number plates is unacceptable.

Do you in the private sector have an amnesty on stationary- and no more to be bought till April- so bring in pens from home? ( ie months away) do you in private sector have to buy own tea bags for work and bring them in? Have you ever had something like a Xmas party put on for you ( i have in private sector- we did not have Xmas parties in ublic, although some of us organised to go out for a meal which we paid for ourselves)

The fact is most civil servants & LG employees are not highly paid.

That reminded me of a story I saw yesterday. It's about the US Banks and TARP, but I wonder if it's going on in the city too (or indeed the upper echelons of the civil service?):

seekingalpha.com
No Such Thing as a Free Lunch? Tell That to Citigroup
by: Joshua Morgan Brown January 13, 2009 | about stocks:
True story…I'm at Cafe Metro on 46th and Lex grabbing some lunch on a recent weekday afternoon. The place is packed with lines of 5 or 6 deep at the salad counter, the made-to-order pasta kiosk and especially at the cash register.
In front of me is a well-dressed, middle-aged man with graying hair and glasses in a conservative navy blue suit. ...
Little did I know that there was something incredibly special and magical about this gentleman! You see, he knows the secret password ...
How do I know this? Well, when Blue Suit stepped up to the register and placed his tray in front of the cashier, rather than take out his wallet or a $20 bill or a credit card or anything that resembled the currency us mere mortals are forced to exchange for goods and services, he simply parted his lips and said the magic word: "CITIGROUP"

I kid you not, readers, he literally uttered the word "Citigroup" (C) and his quesadilla was packed in a bag with plastic utensils and napkins, and he was out the door. No one asked him for ID or made a note anywhere of what he was eating that day. He just said "Citigroup" and bounced. I was on line to pay behind him with my own chicken quesadilla and a bottle of Diet Pepsi…cost to me as a non-Citigroup employee: $9.85 plus tax.
So here's the point…I was all for the bank bailouts as a means of preventing systemic risk. Who wants to see bank runs and people hoarding money and precious metals in their safes? That said, the U.S. taxpayer, with an assist from the TARP Fund, has already given Citigroup, wait for it…$52 billion unearned dollars to save themselves, as well as a loss-sharing agreement on $306 Billion of the toxic sludge on their balance sheet. And because Citi has been such a phenomenally well-run enterprise to have found itself in the position of panhandling, we must also underwrite the lunches of it's peerless employees, apparently, in the hopes that we can retain their services in the future.
Oh yes, we must make sure we retain the the incredibly brilliant legions of executives at firms like Citi, Morgan Stanley (MS), AIG and B of A (BAC). And in doing so, we must spare no expense or extravagance. With $700 billion in TARP funds, does it really matter if $300 million or so is spent on things like employee restaurant tabs, hunting trips, bonus payments, monthly garage parking, spa treatments, free day care, paternity leave (yeah, they really offer that at bulge bracket firms), corporate retreats and fwee ice cweam cones to boost morale?
I can only imagine asking the owner of my firm for day care expenses. He'd say "You make plenty of money, pay for it yourself like everyone else does." My firm is not on the TARP handout list; we operate in the real world and have to actually make money and care about things like risk. Citigroup and its ilk are asking for money in order to survive, yet they aren't acting as though they actually need it. The bloated pigs are wasting capital and lavishing it on themselves in the form of bonuses and perks as if it were their own cash, and not yours and mine.
Watching this faceless corporate drone walk out with what I myself have to pay for, and knowing that he can only do so because my tax money is being misappropriated, well, I've changed my mind. Bring on the systemic risk. Let 'em all sink to the bottom of the sea. No one misses Drexel Burnham or EF Hutton and they won't miss Citigroup either. Let the failed companies actually fail, and give me back my tax money so that I can choose which aspects of the economy to support with it.
And pay for your own quesadillas from now on, Citi employees…there should be no such thing as a free lunch.

StevieJ

chris_spackman wrote: »

No it's not.

Digby Jones - Civil service could have half the staff.

OK

Former_Spice

[quote=£3,800pa_sounds_like_the_sort_of_pension_you_would_get_from_about_10_years_of_working_local_government_in_a_fairly_low_grade_role.[/quote]

A million miles from reality.

10 years of a funding a council pension is only worth 1/8 salary at 65 or 9% of salary at 60. You are in cloud cuckoo land if you consider £30K+ to be the pay for a low grade job.

chris_spackman

lynzpower wrote: »

no they should pay for it themselves like we all have to

Chris have you spoken to your MP about this? what have they siad?

Yes as in previous post.

No mention was made, his reply was ' councils need to make ends meet' and the issue for the expenses for MP's was not mentioned in his reply nor the amount that those who sit hight in the council get.

Sir_Humphrey

Former_Spice wrote: »

10 years of a funding a council pension is only worth 1/8 salary at 65 or 9% of salary at 60. You are in cloud cuckoo land if you consider £30K+ to be the pay for a low grade job.

Hilarious isn't it. London-based Higher Executive Officers don't get that! But this is the Planet Internet isn't it! Final Salary Pensions are not much of a perk for Junior Civil Servants, as the final salary is not much greater than career average for most staff. That is why the PCS accepted closing the final salary scheme to new entrants. The people who are penalised by the changes are those with get-up-and-go who want to be promoted. It is just nuts! What will happen, and is happening, is that senior civil service pay rising to compensate (it is waaaay below equivalent private sector pay).

ILW

How many people work in the civil service?












About half of them!:D

scousethife

Why would you call your kid Digby?

chris_spackman

A business is in Business to make money. A council is not. we all pay money to Government and the council who provide things we NEED for our country as a whole to run such as the NHS and schools. Does an MP who claims £11k for a new kitchen NEED it to do his / her job better?

Does a high sitting council worker who is driven round in a flash car do his job better? Doea anyone in public office who on average earns £60k + and gets thousand upon thousands in expenses do their job any better?

chewmylegoff

Former_Spice wrote: »

40 years of funding a local government pension and being 65 years old is worth a pension of half salary which is the maximum under the current rules. No idea know where £5700 could have come from? The majority of council jobs are the low paid ones such as care workers. For all sorts of reasons, not that many people pay for a pension for 40 years. Final salaries are likely to be very close to current salaries given the state of government finances and the economy.

well, the govt scheme i was on was the number of years you worked divided by 60 times your final salary, which is where that approximation came from.

the benefit accruing from that scheme for 10 years of working in my dept and retiring at EO grade (one from the bottom) with a final salary of £22k (right at the bottom of the scale, and the average public sector salary) would be £22k x 10/60 = £3,667pa at the moment.

hence about 10 years working in the public sector in a low grade job.

whilst local government may be somewhat different and the pension as you say doesn't work exactly the same (although i presume that you are talking about the rules for staff joining the current pension scheme, and that anyone retiring now would be subject to different rules with a higher % salary cap), clearly the average local government worker is not paid £7kpa, and the typical fully funded pension for someone with full service is not £3,600 per annum.