Author: Phil

The Telegraph this morning carries a report relating how the Learning and Skills Council has managed to spend £54.4 million making its own staff redundant since it was created in 2001. Add to that a further £61.9 million spent in the year before its launch winding up its predecessor, the national network of Training and Enterprise Councils. That brings the total bill to more than £116 million since 2000.

It was David Willetts, the shadow education secretary, who uncovered the figures through a series of written Parliamentary questions.

Typically of New Labour non-managers in the public sector these quangocrats have no conception of cost control. If they did they would question having a Belgravia address for their London office:

Learning and Skills Council
8-10 Grosvenor Gardens
London
SW1W 0DH

Unfortunately the swanky West End HQ is standard procedure in the education sector:

Qualifications and Curriculum Authority
83 Piccadilly (overlooking Green Park)
London
W1J 8QA

Ofsted
33 Kingsway
London
WC2B 6SE

Ofsted might actually be ashamed of their offices just up from the Waldorf Hotel, round the corner from the Royal Opera House. If you go to the Contact us page of their website it looks like their HQ might be in Manchester, but no this is just the postal address of the North regional centre and in fact the HQ is in Kingsway, see Office locations.

Towards the end of the Today programme this morning (follow link and go to 2:47:20) they covered a new survey from the New Local Government Network asking for more cash for councillors (See press release). They claim that young people are put off from being councillors because allowances are too mean. The NLGN survey cites strong support for better allowances from young councillors and warns of the risk of losing a “golden generation of young politicians”.

In the spirit of debate the Today editors put a young Labour councillor from Waltham Forest, Miranda Grell, up against a retiring Independent of 36 years standing, Robin Page. Young Ms Grell, only elected in May, whinged:

It’s like a full-time job these days. It’s extremely demanding, it’s emotionally exhausting, physically punishing, mentally draining.

Poor dear! It sounds like she is trying to be an amateur social worker instead of holding her social services department to task to provide a good service.

Councillor Page did rather blow her off the stage:

Self service has replaced public service. … Now I see self-servers and they want the allowances to match the size of their own egos. And they see Council Tax as a hole in the wall and they can just take the money out.

As we see in Parliament as you pay people more money you don’t necessarily get a better quality of MP or councillor. To call them a golden generation is an absolute joke.

I hate to sound like an old fogey, I am 45 this month myself, but if inexperienced young people want more cash to take part in local politics then maybe we should content ourselves with older folk who have more life experience and are happy to contribute for a small allowance rather than a full salary. More for less? Yes please.

Browsing a few blogs tonight I came across a New Year posting at Burning Our Money. The conclusion was that our government and politics just goes on making law and and spending cash without restraint because they have no restraints. Burning Our Money calls for a set of rules that would limit governments.

The first place to look is the cost of Parliament itself.

I did a bit of research. Judging by the House of Commons and Lords accounts our masters spent £322.6 million running the House of Commons last year (although this included an exceptional item of £129.3 million), £155.3 million on members’ pay, expenses, etc and £106.4 million for the House of Lords. That is £455 million of our cash every year just to run Parliament. The first rule should be keep the whole thing to a budget of £250 million that gets uprated in line with the CPI every year – which is the kind of discipline Gordon Brown demands of local authorities and any business demands of its managers.

Back at the start of the month when MPs were fantasising about £100K salaries (see previous posting) I put up a petition at the Number 10 site limiting the cost of Parliament. If you agree with me that MPs and Parliament as a whole should have to contain their spending within limits rather than just being able to vote themselves any salary and perks that they like, you might like to sign the petition that I have started at the Number 10 e-petitions site.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to fix the budget for Parliament and link it to inflation such that MP’s salaries can only increase if they save money elsewhere.

Follow link.

Last night the Evening Standard carried a story telling how the number of civil servants earning over £100K had trebled. “In 2001, 320 staff at 25 public sector bodies earned £100,000 or more. By this year the figure had soared to 996.” The story is picked up today by the Telegraph and the Mail.

The story is not new. Government ad spending has trebled, the number of spin doctors has trebled and spending on lawyers has doubled.

I don’t suppose that the 996 include the 76 people paid over £100K by Transport for London all by itself.