So if half the civil service deserve the sack - where are the efficiency savings Gordon ?

Lord Digby Jones is reported by the BBC with the following extract:

Ex-trade minister Lord Digby Jones says he was "amazed" to discover how many civil servants "deserved the sack".

This is Civil Serf's point, until she was silenced.

Lord Digby Jones suggests that better results could come from half the amount of staff!

Now given the high salaries and gold plated pensions that many of us are going to die in poverty paying for, this is just point blank not acceptable.

In my personal experience of the state sector what I've found is good people, but a lack of responsibility or urgency or ownership of problems.

I have worked on a contract for a government quango - which was frustrating as they just didn't understand what was involved in a fixed price piece of work. And it got worse when I spoke to the then DTI. ( Such problems almost never occurred when dealing with other private sector organisations. )

This just goes to back up what Iain Dale and others have been saying about the lack of business experience in ministers. The problem is that they accept this bad performance.

Lets be clear the public is being cheated out of its taxes because the current ( and maybe previous governments ) lack the experience to know that the service the civil services provides is sub standard and ineffective.

We are entitled to ask where the efficiency savings are that Gordon Brown claimed he was going to make - to try to defuse Conservative proposals.

Its a scandal. Remember the protests when the Conservatives suggested there should be a reduction in civil servants in 2004 ?

See also previous post "How good is the civil service ?"
And the report in the Telegraph on the same subject, which has more of Lord Jones' views.