30 million quidsworth doesn’t suggest that there will be any remaining unrewarded . Bit like a goodie bag after a party, regardless of how well you’ve behaved you’ll get one. The whole system is over bloated and is creaking at the seams. But hey! Who cares, it’s only taxpayers money.
Oh come on!! They are not getting £30 million each.
It’s hardly a lot is it? There were 480,740 Civil Servants in the UK in 2021 which means they will get about £63 each.
BHP used to give its workers far more each year as a bonus or as shares. Aren’t you pensioners getting something like £64 to help with your electric bill.
What a bunch of whingers! Stop reading the Daily Mail it rots your brain.
Bruce you surely can tell the difference between private companies and what they do with their money as compared to the Government and what they do with tax payers money.
It wasn’t just pensioners who got the £67 a month to help with their fuel bills it was everybody who paid fuel bills so would have included the civil servants too.
I think it’s right that the media exposes such things, that’s their job rather than concentrating on gossip.
So are you saying only employees of private companies are worthy of a bonus? Are these not the people that keep the country running inspite of the half wits that you elect who can waste £10 billion on useless track and trace or £4bn on inadequate PPE? Yet you begrudge the workers their £60 a year? (or £1.20 a week)
Absurd!
A private company is accountable to the shareholders, so if they dont like it, they have a say in it.
No I don’t like any waste so would complain about that in the same way as I complain about giving away stupid vouchers.
And your figures might not be correct as you’ve included every single civil servant, where it was only certain departments.
I benefited from plenty of Christmas bonuses in the private sector during my working life, so I would not complain about other folk receiving one - it would be lovely if everyone could have a bit of a bonus at Christmas.
I am a taxpayer and I don’t begrudge workers receiving a Christmas bonus, whether they are in the public sector or the private sector.
(Even as a State Pensioner, the Govt gave me a Christmas Bonus, though the State Pensioner Bonus definitely hasn’t kept pace with the going rate since it was first introduced 50 years ago!)
The other side of it is that employers don’t just pay these bonuses from the goodness of their hearts - there’s a reason behind them - it can help boost workers’ morale and improve employee relations and loyalty.
It’s not just Civil Servants in Central Government Departments who received a Christmas bonus this year.
My local Council has given its employees a Christmas bonus this year (£350)
I know a lot of people who work in clerical positions in the Council and I think they are underpaid for the type of work they - I know they could earn more salary in the private sector doing similar work, so I don’t begrudge them a Christmas bonus.
We employ a Government to collect taxes and then to distribute it for the benefit of the country. Look after those less well off, etc. Not to give gift vouchers to their employees.
Do you really think that a gift voucher for Nandos is a good use of tax payers money?
The Government and Public Sector employers have been rewarding public servants with bonuses for years, it’s not something new.
It doesn’t matter to me if the recipient spends their Christmas Bonus at Nando’s or not. The vouchers given are usually the type which allow the recipients to spend them at a variety of places.
Most Whitehall staff received their rewards in the form of Edenred vouchers and gift cards, which can be spent in a variety of high-street retail and restaurant outlets, including Argos, Asda, Greggs, Iceland, John Lewis, M&S, Nando’s, Pizza Hut, Primark, TK Maxx, WH Smith and Wilko.
I don’t begrudge public sector employees a Christmas Bonus - the main criticism this year is that the Government have been increasing the usual bonus amounts paid to their own civil service staff. Labour MPs have been alleging that Govt Depts are using the reward voucher scheme to pay their own staff higher than normal bonuses to get around the public sector pay freeze.
If that is happening, I do think that is wrong and hypocritical of the Government and its Ministers.
This is what the FT says about it and it’s not how you’ve outlined:
https://www.ft.com/content/ec08b5a0-9954-49ad-9382-e4bc8f938e4f
Ministers accused of Whitehall pay ploy
Labour says £30mn reward vouchers have been used to get round civil service salary freeze
(If link doesn’t allow you to access site, just google:
Labour says £30mn reward vouchers have been used to get round civil service salary freeze
And you can go to the article and get access)
A neighbour of mine is a civil servant - “works” for the Ministry of Transport. He was at home pretty much right through the pandemic and only went back recently and was moaning like hell. He gets a car with his job and when he was off just had to attend a meeting about once a month.
All he has done for the last couple of years is gardening, sunbathing, car cleaning and generally lazing about. If they are all has “hard working” as him then they don’t deserve anything let alone a gift card.
I’m afraid I can’t access that article because it’s behind a pay wall, so I’m not sure which details differ from what I outlined.
I think I first read about the increased bonus compared to previous years and the Edenred vouchers scheme in this article.
I don’t know how different it is from the FT article.
…and yet foreign affairs continued, diplomacy carried on, the taxes were collected, the defence force got paid, legislation was drafted, contracts were signed, government policy was enacted…
What do you expect the Civil Service to do?
It was this bit that I was quetioning:
Labour MPs have been alleging that Govt Depts are using the reward voucher scheme to pay their own staff higher than normal bonuses to get around the public sector pay freeze.
And I put in my post how to access the FT article. You can’t access through links, but you can through googling, i.e. going direct to the article:
(If link doesn’t allow you to access site, just google:
Labour says £30mn reward vouchers have been used to get round civil service salary freeze
And you can go to the article and get access)
As I said, I cannot access the FT article to read it (either from your link or by using your suggested alternative of accessing the article via a search engine - Google brings up the link to the article but I can only read the first few lines because it is still hidden behind the paywall)
So I’m not sure how the FT article differs from the Evening Standard article and other accounts I’ve read and not sure why you are questioning what I wrote - which bit of the sentence you quoted do you think is not true?
My sentence which you quoted was just my own synopsis of the articles I’ve read about what Labour have been saying about the report which shows Govt departments have been paying their Whitehall staff higher amounts of bonus vouchers this year and last year than in previous years.
e.g.
Shadow cabinet office minister Florence Eshalomi said: “No-one would dispute that hard-working civil servants deserve to be recognised for their efforts, especially those who went the extra mile during the pandemic, but once again, what we see in these figures is a Tory government guilty of rank double standards. At the same time that ministers are refusing even to discuss the subject of pay with our nation’s nurses, we now discover they got around their own pay freeze last year by giving out record numbers of non-cash vouchers to Whitehall staff instead.”
Obviously some depts have done better than others but Dept for Transport has been found to be very lacking. The wait to take a driving test is still about 6 months.