Byrne draws a dividing line over decentralisation

AndyinBrum

Anyone want to guess to which constituencies that there civil servants will be relocated to?

Aidan

Well for once this is the right thing to do. There are far too many civil servants employed in London when they could do exactly the same job somewhere else in the country. Why does the Land Registry need to occupy half a side of Lincoln's Inn Fields? Why does the Welsh Office need its own building in Whitehall?

Chris W

Why the silence over CMD's pathetic performance at PMQs yesterday? Surely if he wants to be the next PM, then he has to do much better than that, and it looks like Gove sinks with him too, taking any hope for our schools off the agenda. Cameron should take whichever of his advisers set him up with this line of questioning out and throw them off a cliff.

General Zod

Aidan, not sure it is the right thing. I would agree with your post if it had ended half way through the second sentence with a full stop after "employed".

Tim Carpenter LPUK

I and many others will be watching to see if they plan to distribute and duplicate functions down to the EU-desired Regions (Cameron is as much under suspicion as the current Government).

Cutting the size of Government is key. First deal with the number of chairs not what decks they are arranged on.

Pete-s

Huge amounts already of the CS are done in N.I. and Scotland. If Scotland goes independent is their main industry going to be running outsourced English and Welsh CS funtions?

General Zod

Actually, to be fair, Aidan, the examples you cite are of agencies that are important and I agree that they have no need to be in Lonodn. I would guess that they could also do the work with fewer people.

DavidDP

Yawn - this is what, the second time Labour have said they are going to relocate swathes of the civil service?

And how many times in the last 30 years has this been raised by both parties?

It hasn't happened to this extent because it's never proved practical, either in terms of work or cost.

DavidDP

"Why does the Welsh Office need its own building in Whitehall?"

I'm not sure how big it is, but it would most likely stay under even Byrne's strictures, as the Welsh Office now is reduced to staff that support the Welsh Secretary.

davidke

Ain't goin to happen. been tried before. Unions won't wear it.

Carroll Barry-Walsh

Chris W: DC is absolutely right to raise the issue of why the Government is funding Islamic extremists or at best being careless as to where money for "community groups" is going, why it is cosying up once again to Muslims who have views which are hostile to British freedom and democracy, why it has not - unlike other European countries - banned dangerous groups like Hizb, why it is unacceptable for BNP members to be head teachers but apparently acceptable for someone who believes that freedom is a "corrupt" concept to be a headteacher of a school educating British children and why the Goverment has done nothing to stop the funding of schools/other associations by foreign sources. The plain fact is that at least one of the schools did have a link with Hizb and to have such organisations involved in any way in the education of British children is a very very worrying issue. I hope the Tories take a much much more robust approach to Islamists rather than the multi-cultural-let's-all-be-friends mush which Labour have been responsible for. But I agree that if they are going to do this they need to get their fact straight.

Dorothy Wilson

Relocating 200,000 civil servants? Surely, the underlying question is how many more are there?

RMH

So they will move jobs from London into the Labour heartlands and lock in votes in those areas.

Nothing says Labour like sucking at the teat of the state.

TrevorsDen

The notion that you can relocate thousands of people from one part of the country to another is daft. The govt clearly hopes some/ most will not move and they can mop up unemployment in the regions.

This will leave either more retired or unemployed in the South.

But we already have many many govt agencies relocated like the DVLA and HMCR (where the lost disk fiasco shone a light on activities of a barely comatose staff in the NE).

Chris W - Balls seems to be giving these schools a clean bill of health because they were inspected by Harringey! This is the same Harringey Council who gave Baby P's parents a clean bill of health.

These schools are run by Hizb ut-Tahrir and receive council money.

http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/files/1257159197_1.pdf

If the Guardian can terminate the contract of one of its journalists because he is a HT member - why should a HT funded school get govt money (no matter from which pocket)?

Draft Crunt

How many civil servants?

"http://www.civilservant.org.uk/numbers.pdf"

Anonymous

The Guardian's story is lazy on at least one point. The claim that

"The government is keen to reduce the number of skills services such as Lifelong Learning UK by 30 over three years."

... is hardly news as it was in Mandelson's National Skills Strategy White Paper only a week or two ago. (And is a bit of a tractor target anyway - 9 of the "quangos" concerned are regional parts of a national agency which was being disbanded years ago; a further 9 are co-ordinating bodies which spend very little directly.)

Cogito Ergosum

The only civil servants we need are those who must be in London. All others can be privatised or be part of local government.

Cogito Ergosum

Try again, my earlier effort seems to have been lost.

The only civil servants we need are the ones who have to be in London. The others can be privatised, or employed by local government.

Bob Log

Main prob here is that the rest of the country (and particularly the poorer arts of the north) are already over dependent on public sector employment (see Castle Morpeth with more than 75% of te workforce on the public pay roll), which combined with national terms and conditions that over reward those in areas with lower market pay means that private endeavour is stifled just where the economy needs it most. What we need is a transfer of (fewer) public sector jobs into areas with thriving economies where they can do less damage. Sadlythe government is proposing the very opposite

2trueblue

Getting rid of Quangos would be the best thing and save Billions. I can not see the need for them, as they have little effect apart from providing a talking shop situation, with no real teeth.

TimC

Aiden -Why does the Land Registry need to occupy half a side of Lincoln's Inn Fields?
You should ask 'Why do we have a state owned 'Land Registry'. This job seems to be done by 'Title' firms in the USA, so why not sell the thing off, it would have a guaranteed income so someone would buy it.

Marcher Baron

My passport office is Newport, my income tax office is Cardiff and my pension office is in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but I live on the English side of the North Wales border. How much less centralised can my services be?

Beer Moth

The reason they want to move 200,000 people to the provinces is to make room for that same number who are at the moment, resident in Turkey.

Simon

Ask Byrne how he will fund this. Ask byrne why Lyons failed. Ask Byrne why Ministers haven't done it before. As byrne for a costed plan for these new ideas and then compare it to the plans for efficiency and all their other plans. Talk is cheap