> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.
Ding ding ding. This is all driven by ideological mistrust of the public sector, as you've pointed out and people are even defending in the comments.
Ding ding ding. This is all driven by ideological mistrust of the public sector, as you've pointed out and people are even defending in the comments.
FDR, who can hardly be accused of distrusting the public sector, emphasized the importance of public control over government sector salaries: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/unions
In other words, “rent seeking”.
The only protection against pilfering of the public coffers appears to be strong cultural opposition to it, so exactly the opposite of what’s happening in the US, for example.
It is insanity to watch.
we can bemoan that the government isn't being efficient, but involving people with even less oversight whose only goal is to extract as much from the public coffer as possible is not a magic bullet that gets the public more for their money.
They are subject to the same market forces though. It's this exact thing that's killing government competency; the pay scales are set lower for a role in the government than at other corporations so qualified candidates do not apply to the government.
Ex. Google's annual revenue is ~400 B and it's CEO makes ~200 M/yr while USA's annual reveune is ~5,000 B and Trump makes ~0.4 M/yr.
Ex. Google's board members make ~500 k/yr while congress critters make < 150 k/yr
But also the GS-15 caps out around 200k which means that the best you're going to make in the USG is worse than an entry level employee at Google.
has the inbuilt assumption that 'market forces' are the only appropriate form of external control.
which is homeomorphic to "ideological mistrust of the public sector".
And your second point is wrong too. See Scandinavia for places that both have a deep trust in the public sector and also deeply believe in markets and market forces.
Try hiring 100 software developers at civil service rates. You’ll get maybe 10 very talented people who are in it for “the mission” or for other ideological reasons, and about 90 who would be unemployable anywhere else.
And that’s after you’ve already excluded 95% of the market with citizenship and location requirements, suitability to hold a security clearance etc.
Or rethinking approaches, and doing such work via OSS, and paying maintainers to keep code up to date, which France has been doing iirc.
So please, it's never been accurate to say the government is mismanaged while corporations aren't. The same things happens in bureaucracies of similar size.
Corporations might be mismanaged, but ultimately they have a variety of price signals they must be responsive to or die. No such thing among the feds and it shows.
actually kind of makes sense. The £600 a day is as long as you need it and can be stopped when you don't. A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.
Sounds like we really need to rethink this massive perk about government jobs. Having a class of people with guaranteed employed for life with no accountability on performance or value they add, always seemed absolutely insane to me.
Can you picture a company replacing 90% of their workforce every 4 or 8 years, all at once? Because that's what I think would happen if government employees could be fired as easily.
Sure. Because the government only needs a finite amount of software, and once it's written its more efficient to drop the people who wrote it.
> a guaranteed job for life
so the person will have to deal with all of their shit if they wrote crappy stuff. Obviously not the incentives we want.
> and gold plated pension.
because who wants people to be able to actually retire? Isn't it better to keep them working as greeters at Walmart?
Most of the GDS crowd (who were good), left to go elsewhere due to boredom/frustration.
The cost of not having good staff is very high to government. DEFRA were recently hiring senior enterprise architects on £70k. They could burn a lot of money (millions) on poor technical decision making but somehow saving 30-50k is the priority.
I suppose they do seem a little unpopular, they aren't breaking 30% but they seem relatively popular compared to the more fringe groups like, say, LAB and CON. Have they, in what I assume is decades of stable political governance, made any mistakes that might have engendered this ideological distrust in how well the political system is managed?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...
See eg https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c072prlxlddo
Meanwhile, at least eight of their councilors elected last week have quit already due to comedy levels of misconduct. https://www.markpack.org.uk/176783/how-many-councillors-has-...
I'm not actually sure what you're proposing you think the major reasons are, since that article is just a reminder that people with money have noticed what a disaster the EU is too, not just average voters.
> While you've clearly mastered the tone of supercilious sarcasm that is the mainstay of British politics...
I will admit a feeling of loss that I couldn't work in "unstained escutcheon" but that would be too obscure a reference. I doubt Rees-Mogg would have baulked.
> Meanwhile, at least eight of their councilors elected last week have quit already due to comedy levels of misconduct.
And a supplementary question - do you feel this is "ideological mistrust of the public sector" coming through? Or is it something else when you do it?