After reading this and many similar articles about the shake up of the welfare system I started to examine how much is spent in this area and what the trends are. The key point I noted is that spending is increasing in these areas. If you look at Job Seekers Allowance for example, the spending per head of population has increased for all but 3 councils from 2003 to 2010. Only Tower Hamlets, Camden and Newcastle have shown a decrease in spending in this area.
For the remaining councils the spending increases are averaging at 81% over this period of time.
Even if you just look at the last 12 months (Mar 2009-Mar 2010) only 1 council shows a decrease in spend (Newcastle)and the average increase is 64%.
Although the recession has already been felt in terms of job losses in the private sector the public sector job losses haven't really started to take effect. Many public sector organisations are just starting major redundancy programmes which will take some time to make their impact felt but when they do, and you add this to the shake up of health organisations, I think we can expect to see huge numbers of people on the move and looking for new positions.
Marry this with to the recruitment freeze in place in most organisations and it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that more people will shortly be joining the welfare system from the public sector resulting in these costs continuing to rise!
it makes you wonder where Cameron and Co got the idea that the private sector would take up the slack? Not a snowballs chance. The major re-organisation of the NHS isn't really going to start to impact on unemployment etc until 2012 at the earliest, let's see what the private sector can do about significant large scale unemployment. No a lot in my humble opinion.
ReplyDeleteAndrew- your point of view is hard to argue against. Especially when you consider how many companies rely on business with public sector organisations and those contracts are less frequent and a lot smaller. I spoke to a senior procurement official in the public sector yesterday and he mentioned his role is now 100% trying to negotiate out of existing contracts rather than procuring anything new.
ReplyDelete