As Scots scrimp and save to pay the highest income tax rates in the United Kingdom, those in the public sector won’t be feeling so despondent. It turns out in 2022-2023 1,414 Scottish public sector employees reeled in over £100,000 in salary, bonuses and perks, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance. A whopping 291 employees received over £150,000 in one financial year. A record high figure of busy bodies having higher wages than even the Prime Minister…
John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:
“Scots will be shocked to learn of the number of bureaucrats with six-figure pay packets across Scotland’s ballooning public sector. With significant responsibilities handed to Scottish ministers and officials, taxpayers would be willing to accept a small number of well-paid, high performers delivering frontline services, but instead they are being given a bloated, inefficient state.”
The eye-watering figures will certainly rile-up a fair few. A true Scot knows the value of a penny…
Sunak is appearing before the Liaison Committee this afternoon. Asked why the government isn’t funding struggling departments enough, he pointed out that public sector productivity is still 5% lower than it was before the pandemic. Meanwhile, the productive private sector has bounced back above its pre-pandemic level…
Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that public sector productivity actually managed to fall by two consecutive quarters in the latter half of 2023. Sunak says “no one is asking anything heroic of them” to increase productivity by 5%. Has he given reducing the size of the state a go?
Meanwhile, with sky-high taxes stymieing private companies to fund the public sector death spiral, our overlords at HMRC can afford to relax – they had the fewest staff out of the entire civil service in the office by far last week, with only 54% showing up. There is only one way to kill capitalism – by taxes, taxes, and more taxes…
Last week Guido revealed how at least 35 British public sector representatives jollied in sunny Cape Town on a massive taxpayer funded booze-up – while their sector was supposedly on strike over pensions. Looks like Prof Linda Bauld of Sterling University, chief adviser to Cancer Research on alcohol, obesity and tobacco had a great time at the World Conference on Tobacco and Health. She has warned Brits about how alcohol causes cancer. Anyway, there she is above centre at a Cape winery.
One prof even went on safari:
Today’s postcard from #SouthAfrica: a slightly heart stopping encounter with an elephant. Glad it decided to turn around & amble off! pic.twitter.com/4TPN1DDukI
— Marita Hefler (@m_hef) 13 March 2018
Nice work if you can get it – bought and paid for by you…
Britain’s bloated public sector could save £4 billion-a-year over the next 15 years by replacing 250,000 human civil servants with more efficient robots, according to a study by the wonks at Reform. Chat bots and other web AI could all but wipe out administrative roles, while drones and robots will take over policing and medicine. This would streamline the sector to its essential human core: the 20% of strategy-setting top minds. Reform said the changes would mean:
“The NHS, for example, can focus on the highest risk patients, reducing unnecessary hospital admissions. UK police and other emergency services are already using data to predict areas of greatest risk from burglary and fire.”
Robots – in the form of AI driven software agents – also have the advantage of not going on strike and making fewer mistakes than humans in critical processes. Today’s study is the latest in a slew of similar reports: Oxford University predicted 850,000 jobs could go to robots. The data-driven, automated public sector would wipe out the government’s budget deficit…
