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January 24th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
Daniel Martin
Last updated at 12:09 AM on 24th January 2012
Big spenders: Ken Clarke’s justice department spent £15.7m on agency staff, despite a ‘freeze’ on taking on new civil servants
Whitehall departments and quangos are spending around £10million a month on recruitment agencies – despite a ‘freeze’ on taking on new civil servants.
They paid at least £28million to such agencies between September and November last year.
Some departments spent more in the three months on recruiting mainly temporary staff via agencies than they did on redundancy payments to departing staff.
Ken Clarke’s Ministry of Justice spent the most money on agencies, £15.7million. The figures emerged days after it was revealed that the department spent £43million on consultancy firms between the general election and last November.
The Government is in the process of making thousands redundant to cut the country’s debt, and the Whitehall headcount is falling significantly.
But the recruitment agency payments will add to evidence that the Coalition’s efficiency drive – including the much-vaunted ‘bonfire of the quangos’ – may not be saving as much as thought.
The information on recruitment spending was released following questions by Jon Trickett, Labour’s spokesman for the Cabinet Office. Last night he said: ‘These figures reveal a shocking false economy; it is quite clear that the Government’s left hand doesn’t know what its right hand is doing.
‘On the one hand they are talking about the need for savings and cutting thousands of jobs. On the other they are spending tens of millions of pounds in recruitment agency fees and hiring new temporary workers.’
Pay outs: The Home Office spent more than £5m on agencies but just £877,000 on redundancy payments
Not all ministries replied to Mr Trickett’s question, which means the £27.9million total will be higher. In addition, some departments included costs incurred by quangos that report to their minister while others did not.
The amount handed to recruitment agencies includes the wages given to the people taken on. The £15.7million the Ministry of Justice gave to recruitment agencies between September and November compares with only £1.9million in the same period on redundancy pay.
The ministry said the temporary staff were used to meet shortages in ‘front-line and business-critical roles’, where ‘there are no suitable internal resources available’.
The Department for Work and Pensions spent £2.8million on recruitment agencies, most of it going to Capita to provide temporary personnel and specialist contractors. Only £2.4million went on redundancy.
Along with its quangos, the Home Office spent £5.1million on the agencies, but only £877,000 on redundancy. The Department of Health paid £525,000 in redundancy, but spent £3.1million on recruitment firms. This included £795,486 for Hays Specialist Recruitment and £219,006 for Randstad Interim Executives.
The Department for Business spent £916,000 on recruitment agencies – less than the £4.4million for redundancies.
A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said that since June 2010 there had been a freeze on Civil Service recruitment, except in important front-line and ‘business-critical’ areas. ‘Clamping down on numbers of agency staff in the Civil Service has already saved £490million,’ she said.
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Doesn’t seem to matter who is the elected (or unelected in this case) party in government at the time, or the state of the countries finances they just continue to spend our money like confetti. They have simply no idea what effect all this over spending in Westminster is doing to the confidence of the tax payers. Yesterdays debate about the £26k cap on benefits obviously came as a bit of a shock to a lot of people as it was on every news channel and even debated on radio 2 with people in shock as they were not earning near that figure but were working full time. For most it’s a disgrace that our money is just frittered away so easily when we have to work hard and for long hours to earn it.
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Employment agencies=PARASITES
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The people who own these agencies must be laughing all the way to the bank. I used to work as a temp sec and on several occasions saw how much the company was being billed for me – it was almost 4 times what the agency was paying me.
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This surely is the economics of the madhouse.
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I’m not surprised. For thirty years or more I’ve seen this again and again in all sorts of businesses and organisations. Some new broom comes in and decides you can save money by cutting back on staff. Then the policy becomes you can’t increase the actual headcount and must employ temporary staff and consultants to fill any gaps. They turn up in another part of the books so thats okay. The temporary people invariably cost more than the original staff. I remember a whole department being made defunct. Then the managers realised there was no one to actually take any bookings from customers. They had to employ a whole set of agency staff at double the cost of the original department. People who think austerity measures are easy to implement should take note. Quick headlines by the government rather than good planning seem to be the order of the day,
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Lots of negative comparisons here between the amount spent on agency staff versus the lower amount being spent on redundancy. Elsewhere on these pages there’s an article commenting negatively on the MoD spending £75m on redundancies. I don’t expect consistency of thought when I read the DM, and I’m rarely disappointed…
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