Officials at the Government Digital Service have launched a new web-tool to calculate the cost of UK Civil Service meetings. It’s not 1 April yet…
The free tool, labelled “Civil Service Meeting Cost Estimator“, was posted over the weekend by a director at the GDS. It allows users to select the length, attendee number, regularity, and seniority of meetings before providing their repeating costs. After feedback from fans of meetings the tool was updated to include checkbox for “mitigation of full-spectrum disasters” which changes the result to “Value delivered: millions saved.“ Value which is no doubt claimed by every meeting organiser in Whitehall…
Civil Servants clearly also drew inspiration from Guido’s UK DOGE project – meeting costs are compared at the bottom with the cost of hiring an NHS nurse. Co-conspirators can play with the tool above. If it takes this level of nudging to get pen-pushers out of their pointless meetings…
Starmer spoke to Nick Robinson for the Today Programme on Polanski’s criticism of the Golders Green police officers:
“I want everybody just to imagine what it might be like. You’re trying to arrest someone who has already attacked two people and has no regard for life. We know that tasers were fired. I know from my own experience with the police, that there are only two shots in a taser, and once you’ve shot them, there’s nothing left. There’s a guy on the ground, he’s got a rucksack on. And I don’t know what was going through the mind of those officers, but if I was there, I’d be thinking, he’s going to detonate something. He’s going to blow me up and everybody around here. In those circumstances, I think you can quite see why what could have gone through their mind is, we need to do whatever we can to disable this guy…
Now, when I then see Zack Polanski come out and retweet or support a criticism of that, I think it’s disgraceful… He’s not fit to lead any political party.”