back to article Government to scrap COI, axe up to 1,000 communication jobs

UK.gov plans to replace the Central Office of Information with a new executive agency that deals with the government's marketing and advertising activity. The scrapping of the COI, which began life in 1946 and operates as a Trading Fund, will lead to further job cuts. More than 1,000 comms staff will be cut loose in an …

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  1. Paul_Murphy

    So.

    Thats fewer people paying taxes, buying rail fares etc. and more claiming dole, mortgage insurance etc.

    This country will be paying the price of the bankers greed for decades - and it's going to wreck a lot of lives.

    The banks should have been allowed to fail.

    ttfn

    1. Mike123456
      WTF?

      Really?

      So, fewer people paying taxes you say?

      These being people employed by the government, so paid from the public purse?

      It is unsustainable to have so many employees paid by the public purse.

      Have you any how many people in the private sector earning an average wage it takes to pay the salary of one public official. Work it out.

      Private employees generate money, paid to the government in taxes to pay salaries of public servants.

      The ratio of public/private employees in this country is approx 4 to 1. So, 4 income taxes to pay for 1 public servant. DO THE MATHS.

      I agree that we will be bailing the banks out for quite some time, but we also have to pay for calamity Brown's overspending, and selling off of the family jewels.

      Under labour, we careered out of a financial boom, sideways, with screeching tires, flat broke.

      Time to readdress the balance of employment.

    2. Martin 19
      FAIL

      FFS, the cuts and the bailout are separate things, and;

      The current recession has multiple and interconnected causes, of which the 'bankers' are one.

      Blaming 'bankers' is like there being a plane crash, and you beating a local lorry driver over the head because he's one of the "transport men" who are 'responsible'.

      AND the generally accepted wisdom is that allowing the banks to fail would have resulted in a far worse recession than we have/are currently experiencing. How many lives would be 'wrecked' then? But that'd be OK, after all the 'bankers' would have been 'punished', right?

      1. MinionZero
        Pint

        Food chain

        @Martin 19: "Blaming 'bankers' is like there being a plane crash, and you beating a local lorry driver over the head because he's one of the "transport men" who are 'responsible'."

        No using your analogy, blaming 'bankers' is like blaming the pilot who wasn't paying enough attention whist at the controls, which directly led to the plane flying into the mountain. Why they weren't paying enough attention was because as usual, to them everything in their little self-interested world view was fine. Their money was rolling in (as they were screwing money out of people who couldn't afford to pay it back right/left and centre), plus they were preoccupied with thinking about things like buying that new holiday home with all the money they were earning, perhaps also where to go on holiday, that nice new top of the range sports car ... then suddenly, oh shit, what's that in the window, its trees, on a mountain!, then BAMM!!

        The problem now is the pilots lived and in their usual self-absorbed and self-interested greed to prosper, they are now eating the survivors of their crash, and in the process, their endless greed is making them ever fatter off the staving survivors!

        Also these Government 1,000 communication jobs were more Government zombies who were also getting ever fatter off the staving survivors!

        Guess where we are on their food chain! ... Time to run!

        Drinks icon, as its Friday! :) … and for some reason, I feel like running to the pub. ;) … (I've been on my zombie overlords menu enough this week!).

        1. Martin 19
          Pint

          @minionzero

          You're right; every banker in the world was directly involved in foisting subprime mortgages and other dubious loans onto people who had no responsibility whatsoever for ensuring that they could repay loans that they took out. /sarcasm

          I think you're totally and maybe dangerously wrong about this, but hell; you're probably a nice bloke, enjoy your evening. :)

    3. Vic

      Not possible :-(

      > The banks should have been allowed to fail.

      The banks, in the form they were (and still are) could not be allowed to fail. The interconnectedness of the finance industry meant that no-one would have any money, as any surviving banks wouldn't give anyone else access to anything.

      The real problem is that the banks were allowed to get into this situation. If we believe in a capitalist society, no organisation should ever be allowed to get too big to fail, as that places it in a privileged position compared to its competitors, and precludes market forces from correcting errant behaviour.

      Quite why the heads of the various banks were permitted to pay themselves large bonuses after screwing the pooch so royally is beyond me. Perhaps their local councils had failed to maintain any lampposts in a condition good enough to support the weight of a fat banker[1]...

      Vic.

      [1] Yes, I did mis-type that first time around.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    COI Greatest Hits

    "Coming soon on a 24-DVD collection: COI Greatest Hits

    From the glory days of the 1970's 'Don't lick high voltage power lines' and 'Motorways are not football pitches' through to the addled and ranty 2000's with 'Cannabis will gove you permanent brain damage and cause you to throw up constantly for the rest of your life' and 'driving at 40mph in a 30 limit, ever, will kill millions of children'.

    Available in all good shops, free*, now.

    *'free' as in you already paid £millions for it last year, but it's 'free' now"

  3. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    @So

    No these are highly skilled employees who are vitally needed by industry.

    Everytime anybody complains about civil services salaries it is pointed out how it's necessary to pay lots to attract the very best.

    So really previous governments have been crippling industry by siphoning off the best talent to work for the civil service. Now these people are free to work in the private sector productivity growth should be enormous

  4. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    This won't end well

    Even if we're harsh about civil servants, binning 1000 of them isn't a good thing. I love the idea of the COI exec. pulling up the drawbridge as his final act in office. It fits in with the current ethos.

    (Anon because, um, I'm a civil servant working in Comms....)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    It's sad really

    As an ex-COI person it's sad to see it go - but the writing was on the wall many years ago.

    I remember an ex-director in my time, writing an article in Campaign magazine, saying that 'before too long it will be the Central Room of information' and he was prophetically right. Towards the end of my 17 years in Hercules Road, the staffing levels shrank as departments were slowly eliminated one by one. My department was shut down as we were deemed to be doing work that could be done in the private sector. Whether it could be done cheaper I don't know - but yes it could be done outside.

    In those days, the COI was a very non-civil service place. There were of course the suits and the traditional clerks but I would say that more than half of the people working there were creatives or techies. There were film directors,editing suites (Steenbecks), dubbing engineers and preview theatres. PA teams supporting Maggie & John Major and various Chancellors at press conferences. There were teams than ran conferences for MOD and FCO. Teams of translators and journalists producing content for world-side distribution as well as TeleCine and video duping facilities, and photographers and darkrooms.

    It was a hive of activity, a great place to work and I probably had more fun there than in any other place I've worked - and we worked long hours too. I've worked from 4 in the morning 'til after midnight on many an occasion.

  6. Shocked Jock
    Big Brother

    "[A] tightening of control of communication expenditure."

    You bet! Monitoring at GCHQ - the government's spooks tapping into other countries' data - is to be funded from your BBC licence fee.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Pity it wasn't the DVLA

    With the contempt they show their customers, the sooner the jobsworths that work there are culled, the better.

  8. John Smith 19 Gold badge

    Peter Greenaway started there

    I always wondered if you watched enough of their PSB's you'd spot his style.

    An obsession with numbers perhaps?

    It would be interesting to discover how much of that size happened under Labor.

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