Civil Service Redundancies

debmin39

Currently on a 5 year career break following maternity (1.5 years left). I worked in personnel prior to maternity which has now gone as HR connect taken over. My concern now is will i get back in? I keep in touch with a lot of colleagues and they say its bad!! lots of departments have ceased and they have been re deployed several times. also non existent work!! Was talking to a friend who said she was advised by a senior manager not to take a career break as no chance of getting back in. I am really worried and not sure whether to cut cb short and try and get in now or wait it out!! any ideas??

NAR

debmin, cuts this year are nothing compared to the next two years IMHO. Financial targets are going to be very stringent and the easiest way of Departments meeting their recurrent budget targets are staff cuts.
I would certainly consider your position very carefully.

Belfastbelle

instead of speculating- give them a ring.

You need to know where you stand
(check your career break conditions- have you anything in writing? )

NASA_2

x12yhp wrote: »

They are only slack until there is a problem or the work fails to get done. At this point you encounter the pertinent difference between public and private; in the private sector, heads roll.

Yet the service remains inept. What is the point in sacking someone just to hire someone equally as useless? Sure, there is the chance you'll fluke a competent worker, but in that time another competent worker has probably already left due to working with imbeciles.

x12yhp

NASA wrote: »

Yet the service remains inept. What is the point in sacking someone just to hire someone equally as useless? Sure, there is the chance you'll fluke a competent worker, but in that time another competent worker has probably already left due to working with imbeciles.

What you are proposing it to employ people and accept that they will not do their job. You are proposing to accept your taxes and mine being used for no other real purpose than keeping someone in a job. With the tone of posts one would wonder what the point is in even trying - I have not yet reached such a depressive view of the world and I remain willing to consider how to make things better. Each to their own.

NASA_2

x12yhp wrote: »

What you are proposing it to employ people and accept that they will not do their job.

What I am saying is that the service never improves. I can think of Vodafone being one example where things dont improve with time. One person saying one thing but another department saying another.

I guess it is a depressing outlook on things but it just is how I feel. Why spend money recruiting and training people who are just going to provide a poor service when you can keep your already trained poor staff and keep the money not spent as profit.

Idiots like me never learn though and keep taking expensive contracts and are forced to put up with poor service for the length of them. And none of the other providers are much better. So next time I am just going for the cheapest deal as the service is poor everywhere. The private sector getting involved in public service wont improve standards. It will just increase turnover in staff.

dot.bargain

When I renewed my driving licence recently, I had to jump through a stack of hoops to prove it was me in the photo and not some imposter. Despite having held a NI licence for decades.

All this just so some civil servant can be kept in a job rubber stamping forms........Get rid of them I say!

the sooner they become quangos and start paying their way the better.

Big storm heading for NI public sector,

x12yhp

NASA wrote: »

I guess it is a depressing outlook on things but it just is how I feel. Why spend money recruiting and training people who are just going to provide a poor service when you can keep your already trained poor staff and keep the money not spent as profit.

But the logical corollary to this is that we should not train people at all. Then we should not educate people. In fact we should all go back to living in caves...

The way things are is wrong and it is bad but it is that way for a reason. It is just time we stopped !!!!! footing about and got down to tackling the core problem.

dot.bargain wrote: »

All this just so some civil servant can be kept in a job rubber stamping forms........Get rid of them I say!

This is where I am coming from. There are jobs there for the sake of employing people. We do not need them. Yes there is poor performance as well but tackling that is probably a secondary issue behind making sure that jobs exist for a real reason.

Golden_Anemone

dot.bargain wrote: »

When I renewed my driving licence recently, I had to jump through a stack of hoops to prove it was me in the photo and not some imposter. Despite having held a NI licence for decades.

dot.bargain, the fact is changes in legislation have introduced a statutory obligation for these additional identity checks, not a civil servant or someone trying to create fake work for civil servants to do.

The private sector has also had new obligations in respect of identity checks - have you tried to open a new bank account recently? I have and they require way more evidence to prove ID than they did when I opened my first account over 20 years ago and just gave my name and address and nothing else was required.

x12yhp wrote: »

This is where I am coming from. There are jobs there for the sake of employing people. We do not need them. Yes there is poor performance as well but tackling that is probably a secondary issue behind making sure that jobs exist for a real reason.

Please see above - how are the statutory obligations regarding identity checks to be carried out if there are not the staff to do them? Should the DVA / SSA / Home Office civil servants just ignore these? What solution do you propose that will allow departments meet their statutory obligations and also release the staff whose job it is to carry them out?

miserable_ol_so_n_so

In my humble opinion, there is no money left to pay the existing civil servants. Where the h**ll will the money to pay the wages is going to come from? We have got rid of many many money generating factories, such as cars, electrical/electronics, mining, steel to name a few in prefernce to imported ones( We, myself included, preferred to buy foreign cars etc and in the process watched our workers laid off by their thousands year after year). The much maligned banking sector, which used to produce handsome dividends and tax revenue (I dont remember anyone complaing about it at the time!) has been decimated by the politicians to divert attention from themselves and is unlikely to generate as much tax revenue as it did (I mean real revenue. I know this morning billions were paid to the government from profits, but I believe these profits were from the profits obtained from the quantitave easings! They were not from lucrative earnings from the real commerial world as it used to be before the collapse). As much as I am in favour of taking on more and more civil servants, tax collectors etc (because there is no other work for the young people entering the jobs market except washing one another's hair), where is the money to pay them all going to come from? The crunch will come, as it has done for Greece, when the financial world has dealt with Greece and looks around for the next sick man of the world. We urgently need to find a solution before it gets as bad as that.