An opportunity for expansionist units

[deadlylampshade]

DLS, is that the business brain that can't tell the difference between a 2.5% rise in VAT and a rise of 2.5 percentage points?:face-stir

Fair one...but most people don't know what you mean if you say 2.5 percantage points but know exactly what 2.5% is. :face-stir:
But yes, technically you are right!:face-approve:

And the bad news is that the fuel duty rise you may have seen so far SHOULDN'T be the VAT one...they can't change that until 4th January.

Double whammy as it always is with fuel.

[chiz]

The point is its NOT a 2.5% increase. An additional 2.5 percentage points on top of a rate of 17.5% is actually a whopping 14.3% increase in the amount of VAT you pay. Statistics eh!

There is a reason why the government always say VAT is going up by 2.5 % points rather than the actual % rise....

[deadlylampshade]

If we're going to get into the nitty gritty of the statistics, what is the percantage figure of the pass on costs for all businesses and service providers?

They aren't just going to charge 20% on the same basic price, are they? The basic price should be increased to cover the losses of an additional 2.5 PERCENTAGE POINTS to their own costs (including production costs) and then add 20% VAT to that price. (That's what I'd do anyway...)

[GnomeKing]

only heard it on the local radio!!!!!!!! - yet again archs seem to be hopelessly out of touch with the real crisis hitting this country as a consequence of the Coalition Austerity Con....

i will say it again - there are viable alternatives to the dismantling of our nations welfare, services, culture, arts, and heritage.....BEGIN YOUR RESEARCH NOW!

@Milton: yes please explain why you think all councils are hopelessly 'inefficient', and why in your world curators remain sacrosanct....pretty please?

[deadlylampshade]

Haven't noticed fuel going up 14.3%...:face-stir:

[Dinosaur]

Does all this mean that even if we pool our resources a Forum buyout of Essex Archaeology isn't on the cards? :face-crying:

:face-topic:

[Milton]

'@Milton: yes please explain why you think all councils are hopelessly 'inefficient', and why in your world curators remain sacrosanct....pretty please?'


Gladly, GnomeKing.

The proliferation of pointless, unessential jobs is the most obvious symptom of the waste and inefficiency of the public sector, in particular local authorities (I?ll leave the civil service to one side, as I don?t have a background with them). You only had to look at local authority job adverts in the recent past to understand how the various ?community space challenge co-ordinators?, ?corporate strategy performance advisors?, ?climate change programme support officers?, ?environmental sustainability officers? etc etc achieved little in the way of stimulating local economies or enriching or improving the lives of the local populations.


Public money has essentially been spent on self-serving positions which had little measurable impact on the lives of people living in local communities. Ultimately the expansion of the public sector has only served those people who have been employed by it (a large proportion of some local populations). Being tax consumers, rather than revenue generators, these positions can hardly be seen as financially sustainable. Particularly under the last Labour government, the true objective (or at the very least the main fringe benefit) in expanding the public sector was to create a loyal Labour-voting population. Political cynicism in the extreme. The essential services I mentioned in my last post have probably been starved of much-needed funds as a result, as it?s the community nurses, health-care professionals etc who deserved the money more, and whose wages, imo, remained a disgrace throughout the Labour government.


Specifically to archaeology, I remember the generous training budgets made available to staff at my Council, which were far and away more generous than anything I?ve had since moving into the private sector. There were considerable numbers of people who went on the most ridiculous training courses which had little bearing on their day to day jobs. A day seminar of medieval glass studies here (for diggers who had no use of use of such knowledge) to a fully paid three day berth (expenses included) at the IfA Conference there. I?m all for training, but the budgets available to people in my local authority, and the courses they were allowed on, were often little more than a joke. Yes, useful courses were attended, but were these any better than on-the-job training? A good excuse for a day off work in the main. My former local authority employers have been known to give a snort of derision when they learn that I or my former local authorty colleagues have not attended some local or regional seminar because they assume we don't care about what's being discussed. They completely take for granted the generous training budgets that are simply not available to private sector counterparts.



And then there are the endless meetings. Long, disjointed, self-justifying rambles where anyone could raise any point (and frequently did) and usually involved listening to people with a permanent grievance against the world sound-off, to no-one?s benefit and in a completely un-constructive manner. The debates, which they usually turned into, usually only became really animated when it turned to the issue of continual petty thieving from the chari-snacks box. Cue another half an hour of hand-wringing. Often, when I try to speak to one of the members of my local curatorial service (no, they?re not sacrosanct) it usually transpires they?re in another meeting. What, for instance, do the people who run the HER have so much to discuss?!?! I?m not saying they shouldn?t have any meetings, but their attendance of them appears to be excessive, to say the least.



Although not a truly essential service, I regard the curatorial staff as providing a very important one. They maintain and issue data both for the public and for professional archaeologists. Development control archaeologists issue advice and guidance to heritage professionals. A simple and understandable point, I think. Now since when do the Council field archaeological services provide a full time public service to this level? The field units are not a public service; neither an essential one nor an important one. They are a ?nice to have? in an ideal world where there are no limits to public funding.

[kevin wooldridge]

The problem with Milton's arguement is that it's based upon a false premise (wrapped around a political viewpoint I suspect (!!) is particularly anti-Labour). Who of us can name any local authority archaeology department that employed more staff in May 2010 than it did in May 1997? Rather than expand publicly supported archaeologist posts the whole of the history of the last Labour government showed a reduction in such posts. Likewise spouting garbage about invented posts that happen to have 'co-ordinator' tacked on the end of the job-title should fool no-one.

The largest increases in public spending between 1997 and 2010 were in education, health, defence and (not forgetting) supporting the privatised banking, automobile and production industries. I personally suspect that Milton is getting in practice for writing Daily Mail editorials!!

[Sith]

Self serving positions, generous training budgets and long pointless meetings? I'm afraid I don't recognise any of those from about 20 years working in archaeology in both the public and private sector. Next you'll be telling me that my tinfoil-plated pension is an unfair benefit. And whoever suggested back on page one of this thread that we retrain as accountants: don't bother because even they are finding that there is a distinct lack of beans to count.

We need to face up to the fact that we are all f'd for the forseeable future, regardless of what career we chose and what sector we work in. We have become a nation who knows that price of everything and the value of nothing.

[Oxbeast]

"Although not a truly essential service..."

You are Unitof1 and I claim my ?5:face-smart: