Sunday 19 April 2009

The Thumb-Twiddlers Are Confused


Back in January, Lord Digby Jones saw through the Emperor's new clothes and stated the bleeding obvious about the civil service.

"Frankly the job could be done with half as many, it could be more productive, more efficient, it could deliver a lot more value for money for the taxpayer. I was amazed, quite frankly, at how many people deserved the sack and yet that was the one threat that they never ever worked under, because it doesn't exist."

Well, now it seems that many of the state salaried rubber band flickers and thumb-twiddlers are in agreement.

ALMOST 8,000 civil servants admit they have little idea what they are supposed to be doing when they turn up for work each day.

They told staff surveys they are “not clear about what is expected of them within their job”.

Isn't it to just take the money and vote labour when the time comes? That, and play spider solitaire and minesweeper, of course.

It gets worse ...

They have revealed that across the 13 Government departments only 37.5 per cent of civil servants felt their organisation was well managed.

They are correct. If 8,000 civil servants haven't a clue what they should be doing, management should have issued 8,000 more P45s. But why bother? It's not their money, is it?

At the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, created when Gordon Brown split the former Education Department in two, less than half the staff said they understood what the department was trying to do.

That's easy too. It's to enable the education service to continue pumping out illiterate halfwits to twiddle thumbs and flick rubber bands, in civil service and local authority offices, for generations to come.

Here's a mad thought. Considering the government is going to need to save as many of our pennies as is humanly possible to service the astronomical debt that the psychotic one-eyed spendthrift has committed, and seeing as the results of these new staff surveys (also paid for by us to the tune of £500k pa) seem to agree with the musings of Lord Digby Jones, maybe a drastic slimming down of civil service staffing would be in order.

How long should we hold our breath?




1 comment:

MARA MACSEOININ said...

I'm not surprised they're confused.
A recent job ad. for an Assistant Registrar (weekends only) specified that the ideal person had to have 'Initiative Skills Level 2'.
Now, I'm certainly *not* a jam sandwich short of a picnic but I have absolutely NO idea how you can gain a qualification in initiative. Surely you just have to... go out and... do something useful... ? One wonders how you could qualify for Level 5: by invading Poland equipped only with a penknife, perhaps?