signatory
10-25-2008, 09:33 PM
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/67916/Brown-s-50m-ghost-workers
Sunday October 26,2008
TAXPAYERS are bankrolling an invisible army of civil servants in Whitehall who have no jobs but still draw a salary.
Up to £1million a week is spent supporting the ghost jobs of more than 1,700 redundant workers who are placed in a Priority Talent Pool and keep getting paid until a plum new post comes up.
Despite Gordon Brown’s declaration of war on Whitehall waste the number of phantom employees has trebled in a year, pushing the total annual bill for taxpayers to £50million.
The admission from ministers comes as Britain slides into recession, thousands of workers in the private sector are being laid off every week and millions more are worried about their jobs.
Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude branded the revelation “staggering” and called for an inquiry into Labour’s “glorified job creation scheme”.
The TaxPayers’ Alliance condemned Mr Brown’s ghost jobs and called for the “crazy practice” to be suspended immediately.
In the private sector, workers made redundant can expect a modest pay-off and then hard times on the £60-a-week Jobseekers’ Allowance while they search for new employment. In Whitehall, a snapshot survey across all departments reveals that, rather than facing the dole queue, 1,743 workers deemed highly skilled by bosses continue to turn up each day as part of a mass redeployment pool.
They can spend months staring out of windows, enjoying long lunches and sharpening pencils while they wait for a suitable new post to open up. Each department has a euphemism for its ghost workforce.
Some call them “priority movers”, others are placed in “career transition” or in “people action teams”.
The Ministry of Defence has the largest army of thumb twiddlers on its books, paying 830 civilians with non-jobs. Defence Minister Kevan Jones said staff in the ministry’s “redeployment pool” could fill in locally with temporary work until a permanent post became available.
Meanwhile, the MoD is facing a £1billion black hole in its budget and is under Treasury pressure to axe or delay major projects to divert cash saved into filling equipment shortages in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Department for Work and Pensions paid 368 staff in ghost jobs in May while the Foreign Office had 212 staff drawing salaries for non-jobs in June. Minister Meg Munn said all those were “available for temporary deployment in the UK”.
She added: “They can also be deployed overseas to assist, for example, with consular support following natural disasters or emergencies.”
Even the UK Border Agency, in charge of enforcing Labour’s chaotic immigration policies, pays for 49 staff who are not deployed in safeguarding our shores. Launching the waste-cutting Gershon Review in 2004, Mr Brown pledged to make “big redundancies” which would show he had the strength to make “tough decisions” and save billions for taxpayers. Mr Maude said that promise had been “exposed as a sham”.
Mark Wallace, campaign director for the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “This is a crazy practice which should be stopped immediately.
“Everyone else is tightening their belts to get through the financial crisis so it is disgusting that the civil service is paying people to do nothing.”
Including pension contributions, the average annual wage bill for a civil servant is £28,622, which leaves taxpayers footing a bill of £49.9million a year for 1,743 ghost jobs.
Labour’s ballooning army of bureaucrats has seen more than 600,000 new posts created since 1997, all with gold-plated pensions. The Government now employs almost three million people, a figure equivalent to the population of Wales.
Sunday October 26,2008
TAXPAYERS are bankrolling an invisible army of civil servants in Whitehall who have no jobs but still draw a salary.
Up to £1million a week is spent supporting the ghost jobs of more than 1,700 redundant workers who are placed in a Priority Talent Pool and keep getting paid until a plum new post comes up.
Despite Gordon Brown’s declaration of war on Whitehall waste the number of phantom employees has trebled in a year, pushing the total annual bill for taxpayers to £50million.
The admission from ministers comes as Britain slides into recession, thousands of workers in the private sector are being laid off every week and millions more are worried about their jobs.
Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude branded the revelation “staggering” and called for an inquiry into Labour’s “glorified job creation scheme”.
The TaxPayers’ Alliance condemned Mr Brown’s ghost jobs and called for the “crazy practice” to be suspended immediately.
In the private sector, workers made redundant can expect a modest pay-off and then hard times on the £60-a-week Jobseekers’ Allowance while they search for new employment. In Whitehall, a snapshot survey across all departments reveals that, rather than facing the dole queue, 1,743 workers deemed highly skilled by bosses continue to turn up each day as part of a mass redeployment pool.
They can spend months staring out of windows, enjoying long lunches and sharpening pencils while they wait for a suitable new post to open up. Each department has a euphemism for its ghost workforce.
Some call them “priority movers”, others are placed in “career transition” or in “people action teams”.
The Ministry of Defence has the largest army of thumb twiddlers on its books, paying 830 civilians with non-jobs. Defence Minister Kevan Jones said staff in the ministry’s “redeployment pool” could fill in locally with temporary work until a permanent post became available.
Meanwhile, the MoD is facing a £1billion black hole in its budget and is under Treasury pressure to axe or delay major projects to divert cash saved into filling equipment shortages in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Department for Work and Pensions paid 368 staff in ghost jobs in May while the Foreign Office had 212 staff drawing salaries for non-jobs in June. Minister Meg Munn said all those were “available for temporary deployment in the UK”.
She added: “They can also be deployed overseas to assist, for example, with consular support following natural disasters or emergencies.”
Even the UK Border Agency, in charge of enforcing Labour’s chaotic immigration policies, pays for 49 staff who are not deployed in safeguarding our shores. Launching the waste-cutting Gershon Review in 2004, Mr Brown pledged to make “big redundancies” which would show he had the strength to make “tough decisions” and save billions for taxpayers. Mr Maude said that promise had been “exposed as a sham”.
Mark Wallace, campaign director for the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “This is a crazy practice which should be stopped immediately.
“Everyone else is tightening their belts to get through the financial crisis so it is disgusting that the civil service is paying people to do nothing.”
Including pension contributions, the average annual wage bill for a civil servant is £28,622, which leaves taxpayers footing a bill of £49.9million a year for 1,743 ghost jobs.
Labour’s ballooning army of bureaucrats has seen more than 600,000 new posts created since 1997, all with gold-plated pensions. The Government now employs almost three million people, a figure equivalent to the population of Wales.