300,000 UK Public Sector Jobs Face Axe; No Sacred Cows Including Quangos; What the Hell are Quangos?
by ilene - May 23rd, 2010 8:35 pm
300,000 UK Public Sector Jobs Face Axe; No Sacred Cows Including Quangos; What the Hell are Quangos?
Courtesy of Mish
Cheers to Austerity in the UK. Here is something the US needs to see twentyfold minimum: 300,000 jobs in public sector face the axe
AT least 300,000 Whitehall and other public sector workers may lose their jobs as the coalition government sets to work cutting the £156 billion budget deficit.
As George Osborne, the chancellor, prepares to unveil the first £6 billion of cuts tomorrow, the full scale of the job losses that will follow has begun to emerge.
The initial savings to be announced will target such items as civil servants’ perks, which include taxis, flights and hotel accommodation.
The package will also include a £513m cut in the budgets for quangos, with some being abolished altogether.
“The outgoing chief secretary [Liam Byrne] said it all, there is no money,” said a Treasury source. “There is no time either.”
Some estimates suggest that the number of job losses could reach 700,000. These will include tens of thousands of health service managers as well as many thousands of doctors and nurses, according to internal documents from the National Health Service.
Three out of the 10 strategic health authorities have disclosed that they will reduce their headcounts by a total of 30,132, an average of 8.7%. If these cuts were replicated nationwide, the total job losses would amount to 120,000.
A similar analysis of 75 local authorities suggests that at least 100,000 council workers across the country will lose their jobs.
Thousands of police officers and their civilian support staff will lose their posts, with the Metropolitan police alone forecasting 445 job cuts.
About 20,000 jobs will be lost at the Ministry of Defence as the department faces a demand to reduce its administrative costs by 25%. Ministry insiders say the cuts are set to hit military personnel, including some frontline soldiers.
Ministers have tried to insist that any public sector job losses would be mainly among the “penpushing” bureaucrats, but answers received under freedom of information requests suggest that a wide variety of different professions will be hit.
No Sacred Cows
The Times Online also stipulates No sacred cows as the cuts begin
Tomorrow George Osborne, the chancellor, will announce £6 billion of Whitehall efficiency savings, a taster for the draconian cuts