‘Deceit gap’ of £35m. is now revealed
Monday 20th July 2009, 2:30PM BST.
AT THE end of last year, islanders believed two things: that in signing up for the zero-10 tax changes the States was committed to spending less taxpayers’ money; and that government was employing a total of 4,540 public sector workers.
Today, we now know that that was deception on a grand scale.
The actual number of people employed last December was 5,413 – 873 more than declared.
There is a reason for that. Previously, staff numbers were calculated on a full-time equivalent basis under a policy designed to limit the number, and therefore the cost, of the island’s burgeoning public sector.
What departments – and the politicians allegedly safeguarding islanders’ interests – quickly realised was that the ‘restrictions’ could easily be circumvented by engaging contract and temporary staff.
So the gulf between the previous FTE figure and the payroll figure now more accurately used by Treasury and Resources, represents what islanders might regard as the ‘deceit gap’ between what the States says it would do and what it actually did do.
And there is a huge cost involved. Because each public sector employee costs the taxpayer an average – excluding the deficit in their gold-plated and unaffordable pension scheme – of more than £41,000 a year, Guernsey has been spending up to £35.8m. a year more than had departments not wilfully circumvented the limitation policies.
In one year alone, then, top civil servants and their political leaders have blown the equivalent of a replacement Les Beaucamps School yet said they embrace the need for restraint.
Even if that example is seen as an extreme interpretation of the data, the actual rise in numbers employed between 2007 and 2008 is 63, at a very real extra cost of £2.5m.
So while preaching economy, government was recruiting staff at more than one a week and every seven days charging islanders an extra £41,000 (excluding the future pension burden).
The worst offender? Health, at 36, responsible for more than half of all the growth.
Interestingly, according to Treasury, just eight of them were nurses.
The States will make a further raid on taxpayers’ pockets later this year and justify it as unavoidable despite all the cuts and restraint.
But the facts expose the myth.
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This means of avoiding the people cap is nothing new. been going on for years.
More telling is the comment “The worst offender? Health, at 36, responsible for more than half of all the growth.
Interestingly, according to Treasury, just eight of them were nurses”
Seems Heath and Education are still following the worst practice of the UK and taking on administrators and not front line troops.
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If this report is not evidence of the contempt of our deputies for the electorate, I don’t know what is. All of those candidates who supported Zero-10 (and some who didn’t)vowed to restrict the growth of government spending. That’s what the people of Guernsey voted for. These “economisers”, many of whom are now on States spending committees, are now as spendthrift as any we have ever had.
Who can we vote for now?
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5413 States employees…remove teachers, nurses, police and other front line staff and just how many administrators, pencil pushers and middle managers are we employing and for what benefit?
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carts
A good question.
There are quite a few “teachers and lecturers” who spend much of their time on what a tribunal described in 1999 as low level administration.
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Carts
That’s the question that must be answered. The administrative element of our essential services has been allowed to mushroom completely out of control and it seems to be never-ending. Unfortunately those at the front line such as the nurses, the teachers and the police force are the ones who suffer most.
We have probably all heard of first-hand examples of over-staffing, but I know of former civil servants who had done their week’s work by Wednesday afternoon and spent the rest of the week studying for professional exams so that they could leave and find a more challenging role, and of people running very active E-Bay businesses in work time without it impacting at all on their work. They then had reviewers coming in to assess their workloads and, despite fearing cuts, were told that they could have two extra members of administrative staff !
I have it on reliable authority that this is rife throughout the civil service and has been for many years, but who is going to be responsible for addressing it ? Oh, I forgot, that will be the civil servants themselves, who are totally unaccountable and totally out of control. I dare say they will threaten to go on strike if subjected to an external review.
One very solution. Cut the cost of the civil service administrative force by 10% by the end of 2010 and make sure that the massive cost savings get directly applied to those areas of our essential service which are suffering as a result of a shortage of funds. Hunter Adam can then have his desired funding increases for delivering a proper health service, directly funded by addressing the severe administrative inefficiencies within multiple areas of his own department. Ditto Education and other significant areas of the civil service. Its not rocket-science and is achievable if there is the political will to deal with it. But as we well know that’s a very big “if” indeed.
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As I have remarked before, almost everyone in Guernsey will know of at least one example of Spanish practices, redundant grade levels, waste or downright theft in one or other States department. Squandering of the taxpayers money is rife and longstanding.
It is in the managers’ interests to maintain the status quo so those civil servants who are in possession of hard evidence are the very ones who will not, or cannot, come forward. For this reason it is up to our elected representatives to wade in and and expose the guilty.
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But even the so-called front line staff spend most of their time filling in forms. A risk assessment for this; an audit of that; an application in triplicate for a new pencil to fill in the pencil requisition form.
When a family member was last in hospital, I noted that there were two or three Registrered nurses and a charge nurse visible – all of whom were writing, whilst two auxiliaries tended to the patients general wants. No doubt a Reg. nurse would have attended should a clinical need arisen, and no doubt they were also pro-active in asking whether their services were required from time to time. But the impression was that the most expensive ward staff were not engaged with the patients, but were more employed in the prevention of blame, by being able to provide an audit trail of “best practice” applied to everything in the ward!
How many of them entered the profession for that?
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