http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... train.html


These jobs should never have been created in the first place. Make a start and sack anyone who appointed anyone for these non jobs and clear out the HR people who recruited them. Make it very clear that wasting council tax payers money will not be tolerated. If these jobs are truly useless even consider criminal proceedings against all concerned for fraud.

Do I detect you have quite strong feelings on the subject?

He's not wrong though - classic example from round our way. The council decided to reorganise the management of the local general hospital and created an 'oversight committee' as part of that. Bear in mind the hospital is actually very successful anyway. It scores well in all departments and has one of the best postnatal care units in the country, all before this point and therefore without apparently needing an oversight committee at all. The guy on the council who proposed the oversight committee then appointed himself chairman of it; a job that takes at most one afternoon per week. His pay for this role? £60,000 a year. Needless to say the local paper caught wind of it and splashed it across the front page and the bloke has pretty much chased through the streets. He still tried to justify it though, which I found pretty hilarious.

People understand the need for administration. Someone needs to run things, to get all the people who do stuff in the right place at the right time with the right stuff. But people aren't stupid, they can most usually see the value a position brings or doesn't.

I didn't suggest he was, I'm in total agreement with most of what he says.

Why are we blaming councils? The only reason they're hiring these people is because they are legally required to by central government, and central government give them ring-fenced funding to do it.

It's all well and good saying X council wasted Y million on non-jobs, but that is literally the only thing they could spend the money on.

And no, councils can't defy the rules because either a) they end up in court or b) central government changes the management.

Personally I think some of these "desk jobs" are very worthwhile. The Chief Executive of the OFT delivers savings to consumers of more than 6 times the OFT's budget, and administrators mean the front-line officers can spend more time out doing inspections etc.

That's rich coming from you, I mean you're ready to sue them if one of their pavements even looks at you funny.

LOL. The key difference here of course, is that my local council has a legal duty to maintain the pavements outside, whereas it can't help but follow the dictates of Westminster.

Yes but as you say it is ring fenced so cannot be moved from a non job to extra trading standards officers. If it could then maybe there will not be these non jobs created in the first place. I have no objection to the creation of front line jobs, but many councils have so many tiers of management it becomes a serious drain on efficiency.

But sometimes the management/bureaucracy is necessary. Spending and executing a £1bn+ authority isn't easy, and neither is meeting statutory obligations (nor keeping up with the many, many changes in legislation, "best practice" documents, codes of practice, government guidance etc), keeping on top of staff levels, meeting public demand, staff training etc.

Yes but if they did not spend so long in meetings they might actually achieve something. There are 6 levels of management in the local social services to cover all 1500 staff from director of social services. That is far too many.

I don't think so. I've worked in private companies where there are two layers of management to deal with less than 30 employees (a sub-department), then above us were another two layers of management. In all, there were 4 layers of management for 500 employees - yet local authorities employ thousands.

That sounds like over-managed to me. Though are some of those managers instead of pay increases? That is what has happened in many organisations. In your sub department they are clearly over-managed. It is small enough for one person to manage. Unless you are including team leaders.

I'm including supervisors, if that's the same thing. If you subtract supervisors, then there are three layers of management (not including CEO though).

It would depend on how it is organised. A typical fast food restaurant will have an owner/manager who will also have duty managers for each shift, and then team leaders for each segment and then those that do much of the work. All in a total number of people of 30 to 50 depending on size of store. Though you could probably ignore the team leaders as they are more likely to be simply senior workers on a slightly higher rate of pay. So could have simply three levels layers of staff, or two levels of management. Even with 500 staff you could simplify it considerably to a couple of levels. You would start at the top with the board of directors, then below that departmental managers. All at the same level basically but with different importance depending on the nature of the business. Then those managers will be responsible for up to a few dozen people, but with the odd team leader but depending on roles they may not be management.

Well in this case it goes...

HQ (CEO & directors)
Regional Manager(s)
Store Manager
Senior Management team (typically duty managers, head of HR etc)
Department managers.

And then supervisors, which we aren't including.

Obviously HQ apply to the whole company and not just one store, similarly with regional managers - but that's still 3-5 layers.