More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
Shameful, the Church of England is wealthy enough to pay for their own repairs instead of gouging taxpayers.
The grants for VAT costs also applied to Mosques, Synagogues and Hindu Temples repairs and restorations of course not just churches.
More evidence of this Government's contempt for our faith communities and philistine attitude to our heritage
TBF the real issue is that VAT is payable on building maintenance etc but not on new build. And that isn't specific to what the buildings are used for.
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Yup, that's the difference, companies have got enough productivity measures to make sure remote workers are actually working. The public sector has weak systems in place and before all of the various public sector workers on here jump up and down about how hard they have it, public sector productivity is the worst it's ever been, we could sack 20-30% of the lowest performers and no one would notice.
How do you measure civil service productivity?
(I mean, I know how the official national statistics measure it. But how do you measure it to come to such a certain conclusion?)
output / num_employees = output_per_worker
That's probably where I'd start and I'd define output at a department level, so for HMRC call centres it would be number of customer queries answered within 72h with penalties on the numerator for missing the SLA or something like that. That's with about 10 seconds of thinking so I'm sure it could be better.
When you de-anchor from profits (as is inevitable with the public sector), then that becomes much harder. The man running the call centre will note his KPI, and will tell the staff "if there's someone with a complex problem, and it's going to take more than 2 minutes to deal with it, then do whatever you can to get them off the phone".
And Bingo!, suddenly the staff are hanging up on people who have difficult issues to help them hit their targets.
If you get a chance, read Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. It's an absolutely amazing book about how people change their behaviour to meet targets, but in doing so usually end up making things worse. In the private sector, the profit motive stops this from getting too out of wack. But in the public sector, that simply doesn't exist.
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
The payrises were not really optional if Reeves wanted to avoid a winter of strike action. Politics is the art of the possible, and the practical. As I implied, Sunak simply quit when faced with these and other decisions.
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
I am at a loss to understand how productivity is measured with for example Doctors and Nurses.
Productivity in manufacturing is a somewhat easier metric. A five percent pay rise could be reliant on averaging every worker at Cowley building 0.2 Minis a day instead of 0.1 Minis a day.
Is is not generally about working 'harder', as such. I imagine there are opportunities to make gains on all three within the health sector.
The problem that I alluded to is that the way productivity in the economy is measured is like this: what is the total amount of money earned (simplified to wages + profits), and how many hours were worked? The former is divided by the latter to calculate output per hour.
As the public sector doesn't make a profit, then it follows that public sector productivity is simply the wages of civil servants divided by the number of hours they work.
Now, you might well argue that this is nonsense (on the basis that it is, in fact, nonsense), but that is how all public sector productivity is measured.
In this world, if you increase public sector salaries by 20%, then *whoosh*, you have increased productivity by 20%.
Presumably the invisible hand of the market ensures that public sector wages are exactly what they should be.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Not sure they can do that easily - they've sold off the office space!
Civil service should advertise more jobs on open competition and let people who lose out go. They are also far too generous to people whose roles get cut, there are many often senior people not doing much because they're holding out for some plum job when really they should be told to take what's vacant or move on.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Not sure they can do that easily - they've sold off the office space!
Civil service should advertise more jobs on open competition and let people who lose out go. They are also far too generous to people whose roles get cut, there are many often senior people not doing much because they're holding out for some plum job when really they should be told to take what's vacant or move on.
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
TL:DR Women’s sports will become popular, and the competitors paid as much as their male counterparts, once women spend as much time watching and attending sports fixtures as men do.
Yes but this is also why lady tennis players are rolling in it. They sell out Wimbledon just like the men. The job of sports stars is to put bums on seats, and for some reason women do that in tennis but not many other sports.
Do they? Or is it the Wimbledon effect that puts bums on seats? Its is, after all, part of the summer season for the UK.
Please however feel free to tell Cyclefree she owes her career in law to affirmative action forcing open a door for her rather than her getting on and doing it.
That is a completely out of order.
You said that without affirmative action, you wouldn’t see half as many women lawyers.
Historically, yes. How do you think culture changes happen?
That takes nothing away from women lawyers at all, or Cyclefree, who I respect immensely and I take it as a direct attack on my character to suggest otherwise.
So do you think that affirmative action was necessary as a temporary measure to deal with historical legacies but should be abolished at some point now that the cultural change has happened?
Remember affirmative action isn’t about picking someone worse for the job, but rather about picking someone to increase diversity whereby suitability is perhaps in the balance.
A distinction without a difference. There's no such thing as two equally qualified candidates.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Yup, that's the difference, companies have got enough productivity measures to make sure remote workers are actually working. The public sector has weak systems in place and before all of the various public sector workers on here jump up and down about how hard they have it, public sector productivity is the worst it's ever been, we could sack 20-30% of the lowest performers and no one would notice.
How do you measure civil service productivity?
(I mean, I know how the official national statistics measure it. But how do you measure it to come to such a certain conclusion?)
output / num_employees = output_per_worker
That's probably where I'd start and I'd define output at a department level, so for HMRC call centres it would be number of customer queries answered within 72h with penalties on the numerator for missing the SLA or something like that. That's with about 10 seconds of thinking so I'm sure it could be better.
So they just answer them badly within 72h. Every metric is open to abuse
TL:DR Women’s sports will become popular, and the competitors paid as much as their male counterparts, once women spend as much time watching and attending sports fixtures as men do.
And when the number of men watching women's sport matches the number of women watching men's sport.
Please however feel free to tell Cyclefree she owes her career in law to affirmative action forcing open a door for her rather than her getting on and doing it.
That is a completely out of order.
You said that without affirmative action, you wouldn’t see half as many women lawyers.
Historically, yes. How do you think culture changes happen?
That takes nothing away from women lawyers at all, or Cyclefree, who I respect immensely and I take it as a direct attack on my character to suggest otherwise.
So do you think that affirmative action was necessary as a temporary measure to deal with historical legacies but should be abolished at some point now that the cultural change has happened?
Remember affirmative action isn’t about picking someone worse for the job, but rather about picking someone to increase diversity whereby suitability is perhaps in the balance.
A distinction without a difference. There's no such thing as two equally qualified candidates.
When I was at Goldman, I interviewed identical twins for the graduate training program. Both were at Cambridge. Both had engineering Firsts. The only difference was that one was at a decent college, and the other was at St John's.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
There are lots of other rules that make no sense.
For example, the crazy regulation that means that a shop of 3,001 square feet has to close after 6 hours on Sunday, while one of 2,999 square feet can open as long as it likes. Would society really end if the 3,001 square-footer were allowed to open whenever it wants?
Or that in a time of a chronic and desperate housing shortage, buying a patch of land to build a house on is a years-long nightmare, if you can do it at all.
Or - a personal bugbear of a friend of mine - that London's fine art and antiques market, which used to flourish, has been strangled by EU regulations that we still haven't scrapped, imposing crazy rules like the French droite de suite, which forces those selling art to give a proportion of the price to the original artist. Of course all it means is that any remotely valuable art is sold in New York or Zurich instead and the artist gets nothing anyway, while our auction houses lose out on valuable commissions.
Enough to make you want an English politician with a chainsaw like Javier Milei in Argentina.
Yes. An ICM poll on 24-26 Sept 2003 (about a week after the Lib Dems gained Brent East from Labour), had a three-way Con/Lab/LD tie on 31 points each.
I can't see any other instances, although there was a period through most of 1985 and early 1986 when the three parties / alliances (counting the SDP/Liberal alliance as one entity), were extremely close. One poll in Dec 1985 had them only half a point apart.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Yup, that's the difference, companies have got enough productivity measures to make sure remote workers are actually working. The public sector has weak systems in place and before all of the various public sector workers on here jump up and down about how hard they have it, public sector productivity is the worst it's ever been, we could sack 20-30% of the lowest performers and no one would notice.
How do you measure civil service productivity?
(I mean, I know how the official national statistics measure it. But how do you measure it to come to such a certain conclusion?)
output / num_employees = output_per_worker
That's probably where I'd start and I'd define output at a department level, so for HMRC call centres it would be number of customer queries answered within 72h with penalties on the numerator for missing the SLA or something like that. That's with about 10 seconds of thinking so I'm sure it could be better.
When you de-anchor from profits (as is inevitable with the public sector), then that becomes much harder. The man running the call centre will note his KPI, and will tell the staff "if there's someone with a complex problem, and it's going to take more than 2 minutes to deal with it, then do whatever you can to get them off the phone".
And Bingo!, suddenly the staff are hanging up on people who have difficult issues to help them hit their targets.
If you get a chance, read Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. It's an absolutely amazing book about how people change their behaviour to meet targets, but in doing so usually end up making things worse. In the private sector, the profit motive stops this from getting too out of wack. But in the public sector, that simply doesn't exist.
As I said, with more than 10 seconds of thought it could be figured out, currently there just seems to be nothing and the measure of productivity is hours worked which is completely useless as you point out.
Yes. An ICM poll on 24-26 Sept 2003 (about a week after the Lib Dems gained Brent East from Labour), had a three-way Con/Lab/LD tie on 31 points each.
I can't see any other instances, although there was a period through most of 1985 and early 1986 when the three parties / alliances (counting the SDP/Liberal alliance as one entity), were extremely close. One poll in Dec 1985 had them only half a point apart.
Wasn't there also one in the run up to 2010 after the "I agree with Nick" debate?
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
The payrises were not really optional if Reeves wanted to avoid a winter of strike action. Politics is the art of the possible, and the practical. As I implied, Sunak simply quit when faced with these and other decisions.
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
I am at a loss to understand how productivity is measured with for example Doctors and Nurses.
Productivity in manufacturing is a somewhat easier metric. A five percent pay rise could be reliant on averaging every worker at Cowley building 0.2 Minis a day instead of 0.1 Minis a day.
Is is not generally about working 'harder', as such. I imagine there are opportunities to make gains on all three within the health sector.
The problem that I alluded to is that the way productivity in the economy is measured is like this: what is the total amount of money earned (simplified to wages + profits), and how many hours were worked? The former is divided by the latter to calculate output per hour.
As the public sector doesn't make a profit, then it follows that public sector productivity is simply the wages of civil servants divided by the number of hours they work.
Now, you might well argue that this is nonsense (on the basis that it is, in fact, nonsense), but that is how all public sector productivity is measured.
In this world, if you increase public sector salaries by 20%, then *whoosh*, you have increased productivity by 20%.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I wonder why some Americans might have finally had enough of “affirmative action” when, according to PB, it is so innocent and just
Oh
“1 in 6 Hiring Managers Have Been Told to Stop Hiring White Men”
“52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring 1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men 48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications 53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees 70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake”
Which, as far as I can tell, is irrelevant to what Trump has just repealed.
He has not just repealed Affirmative Action. He has repealed the necessity for employers not to be racist or sexist, as set out in those heady affirmative-action days of 1965. That is a very different thing.
Do you want employers to be racist and sexist?
Plenty of US laws still exist saying employers can't be racist or sexist. Trump hasn't repealed any of them, no.
Does removing a central early one help, or hinder, the situation? How many laws will have to be removed or repealed before you think there is a problem? And how do you think the racists feel about this? Happy or unhappy?
Regression (and repression...) does not have to happen in a big-bang approach. It can happen by a series of small steps, which people accept because they are small and apparently insignificant. Look at the way women's reproductive rights in the US are being assailed at the moment.
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
For an explanation of why Trump is cancelling the “Affirmative Action” EO, just look to who voted for Trump
Men
This is him rewarding those voters, because he knows they are hacked off with being labeled as toxic even as they are formally discriminated against by law
For an explanation of why Trump is cancelling the “Affirmative Action” EO, just look to who voted for Trump
Men
This is him rewarding those voters, because he knows they are hacked off with being labeled as toxic even as they are formally discriminated against by law
Why would a sane American man vote for the Democrats that clearly hate him?
NB: Trump also did amazingly well with young voters, outpolling Harris by several metrics
Not quite, Harris won most voters under 40 and over 60% of young women under 30, though as you say young men under 30 voted for Trump by a 1% margin over Harris
I think I first drove one when I was 38. Russian oligarch's F360 in Cyprus. I was 57 before I owned one.
The modern ones are very different. They have so much power that Ferrari deliberately give them limited front end grip to stop punters killing themselves in slides and spins. Very Lambo like in that regard now.
I smuggled new K&W coilovers for mine back from Germany inside a cool box. Brexit. Lol.
'Shoppers ram vegan protesters with trolleys in Sainsbury’s meat aisle The demonstration was staged by Animal Rising at a store near Southampton on Saturday'
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
The payrises were not really optional if Reeves wanted to avoid a winter of strike action. Politics is the art of the possible, and the practical. As I implied, Sunak simply quit when faced with these and other decisions.
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
I am at a loss to understand how productivity is measured with for example Doctors and Nurses.
Productivity in manufacturing is a somewhat easier metric. A five percent pay rise could be reliant on averaging every worker at Cowley building 0.2 Minis a day instead of 0.1 Minis a day.
Is is not generally about working 'harder', as such. I imagine there are opportunities to make gains on all three within the health sector.
The problem that I alluded to is that the way productivity in the economy is measured is like this: what is the total amount of money earned (simplified to wages + profits), and how many hours were worked? The former is divided by the latter to calculate output per hour.
As the public sector doesn't make a profit, then it follows that public sector productivity is simply the wages of civil servants divided by the number of hours they work.
Now, you might well argue that this is nonsense (on the basis that it is, in fact, nonsense), but that is how all public sector productivity is measured.
In this world, if you increase public sector salaries by 20%, then *whoosh*, you have increased productivity by 20%.
Well then, measure it differently.
Departments internally have a whole suite of KPIs (although those can produce perverse outcomes, as per @rcs1000 's previous comments). The problem here is about calculating national figures, where you'd have to work out something for each different civil service role that would work in those calculations and that gets very complicated.
For an explanation of why Trump is cancelling the “Affirmative Action” EO, just look to who voted for Trump
Men
This is him rewarding those voters, because he knows they are hacked off with being labeled as toxic even as they are formally discriminated against by law
Why would a sane American man vote for the Democrats that clearly hate him?
NB: Trump also did amazingly well with young voters, outpolling Harris by several metrics
Not quite, Harris won most voters under 40 and over 60% of young women under 30, though as you say young men under 30 voted for Trump by a 1% margin over Harris
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
Yes. An ICM poll on 24-26 Sept 2003 (about a week after the Lib Dems gained Brent East from Labour), had a three-way Con/Lab/LD tie on 31 points each.
I can't see any other instances, although there was a period through most of 1985 and early 1986 when the three parties / alliances (counting the SDP/Liberal alliance as one entity), were extremely close. One poll in Dec 1985 had them only half a point apart.
Thanks. I began to look, but thought someone else would probably know. 31 points each, any of these three (and LD of course) would snatch your hand off for a 31% at the moment.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I wonder why some Americans might have finally had enough of “affirmative action” when, according to PB, it is so innocent and just
Oh
“1 in 6 Hiring Managers Have Been Told to Stop Hiring White Men”
“52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring 1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men 48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications 53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees 70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake”
Which, as far as I can tell, is irrelevant to what Trump has just repealed.
He has not just repealed Affirmative Action. He has repealed the necessity for employers not to be racist or sexist, as set out in those heady affirmative-action days of 1965. That is a very different thing.
Do you want employers to be racist and sexist?
Plenty of US laws still exist saying employers can't be racist or sexist. Trump hasn't repealed any of them, no.
Does removing a central early one help, or hinder, the situation? How many laws will have to be removed or repealed before you think there is a problem? And how do you think the racists feel about this? Happy or unhappy?
Regression (and repression...) does not have to happen in a big-bang approach. It can happen by a series of small steps, which people accept because they are small and apparently insignificant. Look at the way women's reproductive rights in the US are being assailed at the moment.
Trump is a racist and a sexist, who sought votes based on racism and sexism. He is a disaster in every way. Have you read anything I've ever said about Trump?
His actions here are wrong. I was just clarifying exactly what has happened in this particular instance. This order did not repeal any laws and a large body of law remains outlawing racism and sexism in employment practices. Trump did repeal a very significant Executive Order and I don't think the US is better for that, but his actions here do not go as far as some seem to think they do.
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
Shameful, the Church of England is wealthy enough to pay for their own repairs instead of gouging taxpayers.
The grants for VAT costs also applied to Mosques, Synagogues and Hindu Temples repairs and restorations of course not just churches.
More evidence of this Government's contempt for our faith communities and philistine attitude to our heritage
TBF the real issue is that VAT is payable on building maintenance etc but not on new build. And that isn't specific to what the buildings are used for.
Just scrap VAT on building maintenance then as with new build
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
Shameful, the Church of England is wealthy enough to pay for their own repairs instead of gouging taxpayers.
The grants for VAT costs also applied to Mosques, Synagogues and Hindu Temples repairs and restorations of course not just churches.
More evidence of this Government's contempt for our faith communities and philistine attitude to our heritage
Have you seen the size of the budget, we need to stop tax dodges like this and the ones that farmers have.
No, we need to cut back on massive payrises to GPs and train drivers and the Labour client state
Actually we need to increase their wages more. Wages in real terms have declined since the Noughties and people are unhappy. If you can increase wages and hold back inflation, then do it. The Government should do things for people, not consider them an underperforming slave force.
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
Shameful, the Church of England is wealthy enough to pay for their own repairs instead of gouging taxpayers.
The grants for VAT costs also applied to Mosques, Synagogues and Hindu Temples repairs and restorations of course not just churches.
More evidence of this Government's contempt for our faith communities and philistine attitude to our heritage
Have you seen the size of the budget, we need to stop tax dodges like this and the ones that farmers have.
No, we need to cut back on massive payrises to GPs and train drivers and the Labour client state
Actually we need to increase their wages more. Wages in real terms have declined since the Noughties and people are unhappy. If you can increase wages and hold back inflation, then do it. The Government should do things for people, not consider them an underperforming slave force.
This is the essential stupidity of many commentators on here.
You can’t force the public sector into some kind of serf class. You won’t be able to fill roles. However, you can (not easily, but possible) reform services so that fewer civil servants overall are needed.
There has been a massive explosion in the public sector workforce since Brexit.
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
Shameful, the Church of England is wealthy enough to pay for their own repairs instead of gouging taxpayers.
The grants for VAT costs also applied to Mosques, Synagogues and Hindu Temples repairs and restorations of course not just churches.
More evidence of this Government's contempt for our faith communities and philistine attitude to our heritage
Have you seen the size of the budget, we need to stop tax dodges like this and the ones that farmers have.
No, we need to cut back on massive payrises to GPs and train drivers and the Labour client state
Actually we need to increase their wages more. Wages in real terms have declined since the Noughties and people are unhappy. If you can increase wages and hold back inflation, then do it. The Government should do things for people, not consider them an underperforming slave force.
You can't increase wages massively above inflation for well paid public sector workers as Labour are doing while most private sector workers see their wages barely keeping pace with inflation at all
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Not sure they can do that easily - they've sold off the office space!
Civil service should advertise more jobs on open competition and let people who lose out go. They are also far too generous to people whose roles get cut, there are many often senior people not doing much because they're holding out for some plum job when really they should be told to take what's vacant or move on.
I apply for one every now and again in case my contract is not renewed.
Lol no they do not. Lots of jobs (I'd guess the majority) are reserved for people in civil service already and externals not eligible.
Evidence (that they are the majority)? Or examples?
Well when I worked there and I think still now, there's a stage system and it's only the final stage that externals can apply. Exceptions can be made I'm sure, but it's generally the case that jobs are advertised withing dept, then within civil service and then only external when they can't find anyone.
As a result they likely miss out on lots of good people!
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I wonder why some Americans might have finally had enough of “affirmative action” when, according to PB, it is so innocent and just
Oh
“1 in 6 Hiring Managers Have Been Told to Stop Hiring White Men”
“52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring 1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men 48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications 53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees 70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake”
Which, as far as I can tell, is irrelevant to what Trump has just repealed.
He has not just repealed Affirmative Action. He has repealed the necessity for employers not to be racist or sexist, as set out in those heady affirmative-action days of 1965. That is a very different thing.
Do you want employers to be racist and sexist?
Plenty of US laws still exist saying employers can't be racist or sexist. Trump hasn't repealed any of them, no.
Does removing a central early one help, or hinder, the situation? How many laws will have to be removed or repealed before you think there is a problem? And how do you think the racists feel about this? Happy or unhappy?
Regression (and repression...) does not have to happen in a big-bang approach. It can happen by a series of small steps, which people accept because they are small and apparently insignificant. Look at the way women's reproductive rights in the US are being assailed at the moment.
Trump is a racist and a sexist, who sought votes based on racism and sexism. He is a disaster in every way. Have you read anything I've ever said about Trump?
His actions here are wrong. I was just clarifying exactly what has happened in this particular instance. This order did not repeal any laws and a large body of law remains outlawing racism and sexism in employment practices. Trump did repeal a very significant Executive Order and I don't think the US is better for that, but his actions here do not go as far as some seem to think they do.
And you miss my point: say a roof has five supports. Remove one and someone can say: "Sure, that's fine. There's four more." They can say removing another does not matter, because there are three left. But removing those supports is now routine, and the others are removed in short order.
Also note the way this is being misrepresented by the racists. They'll be doing the same until there are no laws left to stop them being, well, racist.
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
Going to be a tight day on power generation. Demand high, but wind remains at only 1%. Solar 4% and dropping. Even got the OCGT out for 1%. Gas very high still, as it has been for days/weeks. Same with burning trees.
Demand will be very high on the continent, with low winds, so any imported electricity will be very expensive and restrictive.
Will be interesting to see how close we get to keeping the lights and at what price.
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
The payrises were not really optional if Reeves wanted to avoid a winter of strike action. Politics is the art of the possible, and the practical. As I implied, Sunak simply quit when faced with these and other decisions.
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
I am at a loss to understand how productivity is measured with for example Doctors and Nurses.
Productivity in manufacturing is a somewhat easier metric. A five percent pay rise could be reliant on averaging every worker at Cowley building 0.2 Minis a day instead of 0.1 Minis a day.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Yup, that's the difference, companies have got enough productivity measures to make sure remote workers are actually working. The public sector has weak systems in place and before all of the various public sector workers on here jump up and down about how hard they have it, public sector productivity is the worst it's ever been, we could sack 20-30% of the lowest performers and no one would notice.
How do you measure civil service productivity?
(I mean, I know how the official national statistics measure it. But how do you measure it to come to such a certain conclusion?)
output / num_employees = output_per_worker
That's probably where I'd start and I'd define output at a department level, so for HMRC call centres it would be number of customer queries answered within 72h with penalties on the numerator for missing the SLA or something like that. That's with about 10 seconds of thinking so I'm sure it could be better.
So they just answer them badly within 72h. Every metric is open to abuse
Amazon built its original reputation by having a customer problem tree that always ended in an answer for the customers problem. And enforcing it, with a time deadline, on their customer relations staff.
So if a complaint was raised and not fixed (and accepted by the customer) within x hours.. bad news for the staff.
TL:DR Women’s sports will become popular, and the competitors paid as much as their male counterparts, once women spend as much time watching and attending sports fixtures as men do.
Yes but this is also why lady tennis players are rolling in it. They sell out Wimbledon just like the men. The job of sports stars is to put bums on seats, and for some reason women do that in tennis but not many other sports.
Do they? Or is it the Wimbledon effect that puts bums on seats? Its is, after all, part of the summer season for the UK.
Same for all grand slams, I think. Maybe if they played Wimbledon finals at Wembley...
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
The payrises were not really optional if Reeves wanted to avoid a winter of strike action. Politics is the art of the possible, and the practical. As I implied, Sunak simply quit when faced with these and other decisions.
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
Independent pay review bodies suggested pay rises with rationale behind them to justify the amounts.
In a lot of places those pay rises were to reflect what was required to stop staff leaving to go elsewhere - and you can’t teach without teachers, police without policemen or nurse people without nurses.
So the idea that the pay rises were avoidable is for the birds. As I’ve said multiple times before (everytime MaxPB makes this point) I believe the pay rises are why Rishi quit early
Yes. An ICM poll on 24-26 Sept 2003 (about a week after the Lib Dems gained Brent East from Labour), had a three-way Con/Lab/LD tie on 31 points each.
I can't see any other instances, although there was a period through most of 1985 and early 1986 when the three parties / alliances (counting the SDP/Liberal alliance as one entity), were extremely close. One poll in Dec 1985 had them only half a point apart.
Wasn't there also one in the run up to 2010 after the "I agree with Nick" debate?
No, Labour was always lagging, usually in third, through the early part of the 2010 election. There were some two-way Con/LD ties but the closest to a three-way was a four-point spread, which happened no fewer than seven times between 15-27 April 2010.
TL:DR Women’s sports will become popular, and the competitors paid as much as their male counterparts, once women spend as much time watching and attending sports fixtures as men do.
Yes but this is also why lady tennis players are rolling in it. They sell out Wimbledon just like the men. The job of sports stars is to put bums on seats, and for some reason women do that in tennis but not many other sports.
Do they? Or is it the Wimbledon effect that puts bums on seats? Its is, after all, part of the summer season for the UK.
Same for all grand slams, I think. Maybe if they played Wimbledon finals at Wembley...
Football is an interesting case. Some big crowds now for the Women's Premier League and for Internationals, but as yet far cheaper tickets. I don't believe in general that women have the same desire as men to watch sport, but that may change. Ultimately sport and the wages etc that player receive are a market.
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
The payrises were not really optional if Reeves wanted to avoid a winter of strike action. Politics is the art of the possible, and the practical. As I implied, Sunak simply quit when faced with these and other decisions.
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
Independent pay review bodies suggested pay rises with rationale behind them to justify the amounts.
In a lot of places those pay rises were to reflect what was required to stop staff leaving to go elsewhere - and you can’t teach without teachers, police without policemen or nurse people without nurses.
So the idea that the pay rises were avoidable is for the birds. As I’ve said multiple times before (everytime MaxPB makes this point) I believe the pay rises are why Rishi quit early
That, the prisons bursting, boating season in the Channel, the return of inflation, oh and not wanting to face a mutinous Tory Conference in September.
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
Shameful, the Church of England is wealthy enough to pay for their own repairs instead of gouging taxpayers.
The grants for VAT costs also applied to Mosques, Synagogues and Hindu Temples repairs and restorations of course not just churches.
More evidence of this Government's contempt for our faith communities and philistine attitude to our heritage
Have you seen the size of the budget, we need to stop tax dodges like this and the ones that farmers have.
No, we need to cut back on massive payrises to GPs and train drivers and the Labour client state
Actually we need to increase their wages more. Wages in real terms have declined since the Noughties and people are unhappy. If you can increase wages and hold back inflation, then do it. The Government should do things for people, not consider them an underperforming slave force.
You can't increase wages massively above inflation for well paid public sector workers as Labour are doing while most private sector workers see their wages barely keeping pace with inflation at all
Private sector wage rises have been higher than public sector ones this year.
Annual average regular earnings growth for the private sector was 5.4% and for the public sector was 4.3%.
Has anyone commented on Sadiq Khan pinching electric buses off other routes so he can say the new tunnel is carbon neutral.. these politicians(of all parties) are just despicable... because they would have all done it.
Probably if the population was asked would Farage manage it better it would be 60-40 for Reform Mind you it is all pretty pointless for despite the best efforts of the Daily Mail Labour are in power till 2028/9 at the earliest., probably be longer.
Comments
Labour 29
Conservative 25
Reform 22
LibDems 11
Green 8
Others 5
(1,500 sample, 17th to 20th January)
And Bingo!, suddenly the staff are hanging up on people who have difficult issues to help them hit their targets.
If you get a chance, read Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. It's an absolutely amazing book about how people change their behaviour to meet targets, but in doing so usually end up making things worse. In the private sector, the profit motive stops this from getting too out of wack. But in the public sector, that simply doesn't exist.
That’s where we need to start.
Labour 29 [-1]
Cons. 25 [+2]
Reform 22 [ same]
Lead 4 [-3]
One lucky man had his first drive in one today. They even gave him a special red suit.
https://x.com/scuderiaferrari/status/1882000950157844701
So... actually... I guess you're right.
For example, the crazy regulation that means that a shop of 3,001 square feet has to close after 6 hours on Sunday, while one of 2,999 square feet can open as long as it likes. Would society really end if the 3,001 square-footer were allowed to open whenever it wants?
Or that in a time of a chronic and desperate housing shortage, buying a patch of land to build a house on is a years-long nightmare, if you can do it at all.
Or - a personal bugbear of a friend of mine - that London's fine art and antiques market, which used to flourish, has been strangled by EU regulations that we still haven't scrapped, imposing crazy rules like the French droite de suite, which forces those selling art to give a proportion of the price to the original artist. Of course all it means is that any remotely valuable art is sold in New York or Zurich instead and the artist gets nothing anyway, while our auction houses lose out on valuable commissions.
Enough to make you want an English politician with a chainsaw like Javier Milei in Argentina.
I can't see any other instances, although there was a period through most of 1985 and early 1986 when the three parties / alliances (counting the SDP/Liberal alliance as one entity), were extremely close. One poll in Dec 1985 had them only half a point apart.
Regression (and repression...) does not have to happen in a big-bang approach. It can happen by a series of small steps, which people accept because they are small and apparently insignificant. Look at the way women's reproductive rights in the US are being assailed at the moment.
Men
This is him rewarding those voters, because he knows they are hacked off with being labeled as toxic even as they are formally discriminated against by law
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-08/how-trump-s-bet-on-male-voters-won-him-the-2024-election/
Why would a sane American man vote for the Democrats that clearly hate him?
NB: Trump also did amazingly well with young voters, outpolling Harris by several metrics
The next thread NO WORKY.
https://edition.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0
The modern ones are very different. They have so much power that Ferrari deliberately give them limited front end grip to stop punters killing themselves in slides and spins. Very Lambo like in that regard now.
I smuggled new K&W coilovers for mine back from Germany inside a cool box. Brexit. Lol.
The demonstration was staged by Animal Rising at a store near Southampton on Saturday'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/21/watch-shoppers-ram-vegan-protesters-sainsburys-meat-aisle/
His actions here are wrong. I was just clarifying exactly what has happened in this particular instance. This order did not repeal any laws and a large body of law remains outlawing racism and sexism in employment practices. Trump did repeal a very significant Executive Order and I don't think the US is better for that, but his actions here do not go as far as some seem to think they do.
NEW THREAD
You can’t force the public sector into some kind of serf class. You won’t be able to fill roles. However, you can (not easily, but possible) reform services so that fewer civil servants overall are needed.
There has been a massive explosion in the public sector workforce since Brexit.
As a result they likely miss out on lots of good people!
Also note the way this is being misrepresented by the racists. They'll be doing the same until there are no laws left to stop them being, well, racist.
I think you mean spend less money, and do fewer things.
Demand will be very high on the continent, with low winds, so any imported electricity will be very expensive and restrictive.
Will be interesting to see how close we get to keeping the lights and at what price.
Productivity increases are nearly never “work harder”. As you say.
A classic is how manual machining operations were gradually streamlined until one person watches a number of completely automated CNCs.
So if a complaint was raised and not fixed (and accepted by the customer) within x hours.. bad news for the staff.
In a lot of places those pay rises were to reflect what was required to stop staff leaving to go elsewhere - and you can’t teach without teachers, police without policemen or nurse people without nurses.
So the idea that the pay rises were avoidable is for the birds. As I’ve said multiple times before (everytime MaxPB makes this point) I believe the pay rises are why Rishi quit early
Annual average regular earnings growth for the private sector was 5.4% and for the public sector was 4.3%.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/december2024
Indeed many nurses have had a pay cut, both nominal and real terms this year as the 2023 payment was a one off rather than consolidated.