On day 1 the Leader and Executive Councillors should impose a staff freeze on all new external recruitment excepting teachers and qualified medical personnel. Officers should have to make a case to appoint from outside based on shortage of crucial skills. Councillors also need to ban all new external contracts for bought in services without prior Councillor approval to avoid the easiest way around the freeze.
They should ask each Head of department to draw up a list of posts that can be removed or merged, to implement as people leave employment. Employees will be told that as most recruitment is from within they have enhanced chances of promotion. There will be no redundancies without staff agreement.
The Leader should require each Executive Councillor to produce a schedule of functions/ activities they wish to end within three weeks, and timetables and staffing plans to exit them within two months.
There should be a review of all grants and payments to outside bodies in the first month with a view to reductions.
There should be a value for money audit of the Council identifying scope to boost productivity, raise quality and lower costs in delivering main services.
May 7, 2025
Well….the new leader of Devon CC, in his first day, ordered the removal of pictures of non-Lib Dem councillors. Top priority obviously.
May 7, 2025
@DaveM – personal ego ahead of those you serve.
May 7, 2025
@DaveM; Apparently the first diktat from Reform to those English Councils they control was not to fly any flags from Council owned flag-poles, other than the GBNI flag of the Union, that of St George, or the official Country flag. Top priority obviously.
Any chance comments avoid Tabloid style fog-whistling?…
May 7, 2025
Actually, their first diktat didn’t actually permit the flying of a county’s flag and they had to backtrack and change it.
If they can’t get something as simple as that correct first time, it doesn’t bode well for anything vaguely complicated.
May 7, 2025
What’s fog whistling ?
May 7, 2025
“What’s fog whistling ?”
It is much like whistling in the dark I think, only wetter typically.
May 8, 2025
@Roy Grainger; “What’s fog whistling ?”
It’s the combination of a smoke screen and a dog whistle, as used by our gutter media to hide and divert attention from the real issues, lay a smoke screen, then draw peoples attention towards something of insignificance.
Of course it might just be a QWERT keyboard typo. 🙂
May 7, 2025
That’s limp dumb for you. We expect better from Reform led councils
It’s no good asking incumbent staff to audit jobs, it has to be done dispassionately by a neutral body. Farage is right all jobs to do with net stupid climatecgange or DEI should be cut
Trump has cut funding to these programmes and th sqeals can be heard this side of the Atlantic.
May 7, 2025
Pathetic, but then such are the LibDims – even more wrong than the Labour party and the Con socialist!
May 7, 2025
What do you expect of Lib-Dim councillors ?
We are plagued with them in Dorset because voters became so fed up with Conservative central government.
All we now get is more and more potholes and when we complain they say they have no money to fix them, yet all over the area we have more and more cycle lanes being built which nobody will ever use, and they tell us it’s central government that is providing the funding for them !
The country cannot afford this shameful waste – it’s nothing but virtual signalling of the worst kind, but Labour are just continuing the policy of the last Conservative government !
It will take a Reform-led government will get a grip on such stupidity.
May 7, 2025
@Davem. Actually it would be interesting to do a survey, and ask all the Council leaders what they did on their first day. I bet many of them just “got inducted” by the officers and followed the programme, or rearranged the furniture as in your example.
May 7, 2025
“got inducted”
The first thing they’ll learn, is how to claim expensors
May 7, 2025
‘Should do’. However, councils in recent years are empire building on a grand scale.
They are taking on property development and rental in a big way. Some of them even diversified into the electricity supply world. This did not end well.
Government should intervene to limit the spending powers of councils. This has not really happened under Conservative or Labour. Bankruptcy has been the only spanner in the works.
Some councils are still trying to get the government to bail them out. As always, individual culprits get away with it. They may go on to similar roles elsewhere.
May 7, 2025
Why is it only a new council that should do that ? Why did existing Conservative councils across the UK do those things as a matter of routine anyway ? “No redundancies without staff agreement” is an odd idea – why not ? – standard practice in the private sector to make redundant those roles that are not needed, internal transfers are of limited value if there is a mismatch in salary and skills, why would you move a highly-paid DEI officer to a role issuing parking permits on the same salary ?
May 7, 2025
Regardless of Sir John’s excellent fiscal advice, Farage’s Reform limited company have already announced that they intend to spend $hundreds of thousands of pounds of ratepayer’s money opposing and delaying renewable energy projects.
Apparently the bulk of this will be spent on legal challenges, testing Labour’s ability to push through their planning reforms.
Just so Tice knows, last year wind and solar installations, stupidly harvesting free energy, produced 50% of the nation’s electricity, saving us from having to import at least 35 tankers of hugely expensive LNG. The lights stsyed on last winter.
May 7, 2025
‘£hundreds of thousands of pounds’ might be well spent if it results in £hundreds of millions not buying Interconnector electricity we should be generating ourselves from our own resources..
May 7, 2025
If 50% of our energy is feee how come we have the highest electricity bills in the developed world ?
May 7, 2025
Sir John
Not hard to agree with everything you have suggested – but will any of them even think about it, think about what their job even means? Or will the retreat in and worry about the next election.
To your list you should have had remove all the departments and people involved in the new empire of discrimination (DEI). These departments are entirely personal interpretations and are politicising a view and job that should be entirely neutral. They are not about the act of delivery of service to those that pay them and that they are said to serve.
May 7, 2025
john,
do a post about the massive tax perks to Indian workers which have been increased as part of the badly named trade deal with India, the massive numbers of visas India has been handed, the rape of the British IT industry, the industrial theft of our intellectual property…
and why the ruling classes are so out of touch they think its a good idea
May 8, 2025
What massive tax perks are those? Double taxation agreements between countries are a normal thing. The UK has dozens and dozens of such agreements in place.
If your UK employer sent you on an overseas secondment for 12 or 24 months and you were still employed on your UK contract paying UK taxes, would you be happy to also pay income taxes in the country to which you were seconded? I’ll bet the answer is no, and that is what double taxation agreements do, they stop you being taxed twice.
Any Indian workers coming here have to go through a visa application (which is charged for) and meet the relevant criteria, alongside paying the NHS surcharge (£1,035/year), all the while spending money in the UK economy (much of which is taxed via indirect taxation) while they are here and while having no recourse to any public funds (i.e. they will need to be economically completely self-sufficient).
May 7, 2025
Councils should only get the money they need – and that being so the Councillors are there to spend it. If they waste it then it means they are taking in more than they need.
May 7, 2025
Even though my councils public consultation resulted in 89% saying they were against the introduction of parking charging in the city centre after 6pm (its been free after 6pm for decades), the council has, this week, decided to go-ahead and set chargers after 6pm ….and increase all parking chargers by 50% (£2 for 30 mins)
May 7, 2025
The real audit should be on what a council is physically doing and what can be achieved more effectively and more cost effectively from outside sources. I am talking contracting things out that are then ring fenced by price, delivery and term – it’s called a contract.
It is also recognising that cheap(price) is not the same as ‘cost’. Unfortunately, that is little understood by the management employed by the taxpayer and run by elected representatives. Even those now elected don’t grasp what their duty as the board directors acting on behalf of those they serve means – they are in charge and responsible. It is not about their ego, them pushing political terrorism – it is just about delivering those services that release the people to achieve and thrive – that is how the economy grows whether local or national.
May 7, 2025
Good ideas here. However, there are people who are paid to make these decisions within the council management.
They already will have their priorities and budgets set and presumably are doing a bad job at acheiving them.
Surely there should be a mechanism whereby Councillors can initiate disciplinary procedures against poor managers?
May 7, 2025
Simple question to each and every employee. What did you do for taxpayers last week?
May 7, 2025
Be careful what you wish for. Our local NHS hospital has a ban on recruitment. This has resulted in highly paid medical staff doing menial clerical work at the expense of patient appointments. This is not the result anyone wants. I agree that all DEI roles should be ended immediately, and an audit of services and expenditure carried out.
A review and clamp down on sick leave needs to be done. Compare sick leave between the self-employed and the public sector and the difference is stark.
May 7, 2025
That would be a good start – additionally, as we’ve only heard what individual would-be councillors propose to do during their term, The council as a whole should agree and publish their priorities as well as the direction their decisions will mostly go.
In particular the council should make it clear where they stand on things like net0 and housing immigrants.
May 7, 2025
Electricity meters are in the news again, with a forced closure of RTS (radio) meters this June. According to ofgem 300,000 users are affected.
This is just another attempt by ofgem and HMG to make us take the hated new digital meters – There is no honesty left in government!
May 7, 2025
Spot on Bryan ……smart-meters via the back door, is just another step to the left
May 8, 2025
I needed a new gas-meter as it had gone u/s. I contacted my provider, who asked if they could fit an electricity smart-meter at the same time. No, I said. Ok, they said. On fitting-day, the technician arrived with both. The gas-meter, he explained, would only work in conjunction with a new electricty-meter. I smelled something like either BS or sharp-practise. He fitted both and I will be complaining to the provider. Leaving, he asked if I wanted a display unit. Does it run on electricity, I asked. Well, yes, said he. Then no, said I. I then informed him that the amount spent on smart-metering the country is about ten times the cost of a ‘small modular reactor’.
May 7, 2025
I disagree.
Government jobs are political jobs.
As such it should be the voters/tax payers who decides on the job and pay.
May 7, 2025
Government jobs are not political. These are administrative roles. Pay is determined by those the electorate have voted for to act on their behalf, and is confidential between them and the council.
May 7, 2025
The council should identify its core business mission and put this in writing to all employees as most have forgotten they are there to serve tax payers essentially and lost the plot.
They should have a really true independent review of everything from the ground up asking “Is this activity vital to the core business” and start the zero based budget from there to avoid waste, duplication etc.
Overall every activity needs to pass the 3-Eees
Is it Effective?
Efficient?
Economic?
Finally agree the plan.
Take action asap.
May 7, 2025
+1
May 7, 2025
Exactly.
Good to see the other day that we still have enough aircraft and pilots to organise a flypast anyway. I wonder what proportion of the pilots etc. were “useless white men”, women, “minorities”, “diversity over merit appointments” or other? Perhaps I should submit a freedom of information request, then again they never answer properly look at all the request relating to vaccine injuries.
Boris Johnson is the Tories’ only hope of beating Nigel Farage, says shock new poll – certainly not for me thanks, Boris is a deluded net zero Greta disciple and he and his Chancellor Sunak wasted £400 billion plus on net harm Covid lockdowns and net harm Covid Vaccines, unused nightingale hospital PR stunts … getting virtually everything wrong about Covid. Then Sunak lies (or is very ignorant of the stats) to the House that the vaccines were “unequivocally” safe.
How is his correction coming on now that the abundant evidence is even more damning!
If Reform do not get an overall majority at the next election I would expect a Labour/Tory coalition given their composition not a Reform/Tory one the Tories are still essentially tax to death, net zero/rip off enthusiasts and for open door immigration – just like Starmer’s Labour.
May 8, 2025
I am now seeing projections putting the Conservatives down below 20 MPs. (Around Portsmouth Harbour, Reform would take EVERY constituency.) Those figures are dire enough to force even the One Nation Group to move to the right. I gather that they met last night.
May 7, 2025
Significant trade deal signed with India
Talk about hype and misinformation from HMG – when the trade secretary says;
Then you can be sure it does.
It allows just that, permitting Indian people to work in Britain without paying national insurance, for example.
WHY the heck do we need more foreign workers coming into Britain taking our jobs?
More unwanted globalisation!
May 7, 2025
”What a new Council should do”
Only spend what they receive in government grant and council tax. Not a penny more
May 7, 2025
There are more than 300 councils in England. The Taxpayers’ Alliance is telling us that in 2024 £52m have been spent on staff with DEI-related responsibilities. The total budget of these English councils was £130.8 bn for 2024/25. So 52/130800 = 0.04%.
‘Jump’ says Farage, Jenkyns et al. ‘How high?’ says the average contributor here.
May 7, 2025
Rather predictably hefner posts saying that saving £52 million of wasteful expenditure is not worth doing.
May 8, 2025
Rather predictably Sam does not understand the point, which is ‘why are DJT, Farage, Badenoch, … making so much fuss about DEI when there are things far more important to ‘fix’ than DEI like (for the UK/England) finding a solution to social care for adults (£23.5 bn) and children (£14.6 bn) or homelessness (£1.7 bn).
But dealing with figures is a bit tough, isn’t it Sam? So much better to write a meaningless comment, eh?
gov.uk 12/12/2024 ‘Local authority revenue expenditure and financing, England 2023 to 2024’.
May 8, 2025
You are off on a completely dufferent tangent now hefner.
Obviously I touched a nerve.
DEI is just one example of the waste of spending which needs to be refocused onto other proper priorities, some of which hilariously you mentioned.
May 9, 2025
‘Completely different tangent’? As if the budgets for social care for adults and children and homelessness were not parts of the £130.8 bn budget of the English councils, together with the education (£41.7 bn) and the police (£16.6 bn) budgets. I despair …
May 9, 2025
You are really triggered aren’t you hefner.
Failing to grasp that £52 million pounds wasted on an irrelevant woke subject could be better spent elsewhere.
Anyone who has been involved in running a competitive business, like myself, understands very quickly that these small budget savings made, multiplied and then transferred into core profitable areas are what makes a real difference.
You are from a completely different world and plainly cannot understand this basic fact.
I despair….
May 7, 2025
@ hefner – about 90 pence then for a Band D property. It would represent a welcome start, not least in signaling a reversal of the seemingly inexorable flow of increases in council tax above inflation.
The further point of course is whether DEI operatives are doing any good. In the corporate world, not least in America where it seemed to start, DEI is now out of fashion and is often enough being discontinued.
May 7, 2025
Hefner :
It is not the total amount of DEI salaries that is important it is the damage these people can do to an organisation.
May 8, 2025
A good list, Sir John. Auditing grants is something that might be overlooked. Help for the Scouts and Guides? Yes. Subsidising various forms of sex-clubs? No.