Political dogma has a lot to answer for. In the days of the Thatcher Government there was a reduction in the number of unemployed because after 1 year they went onto another register, hence: No longer unemployed.
With the last lot, instead of trying to save businesses like Rover and LDV vans, they just created a load of publicly funded jobs and more University places.
A prime example of publicly funded jobs would be the South Manchester Diabetic Retinopathy Team - notice the use of the power word "Team". This was apparently set up after a number of breast cancer scans were mis-diagnosed and quite a few women were told they were clear of cancer, only to contract the illness. All well and good you might think, except that in this case the procedure for diabetic eyetests was as follows:
1) Go to your local optician and ask for a diabetic eyesight test.
2) Have test and be told by optician if everything was ok or not.
Present procedure.
1) Go to your local optician and be told to phone the S.M.D.R.T.
2) S.M.D.R.T. will write to you with a patient number and a nice full colour
brochure telling you everything the optician would tell you and includes
a list of opticians, one of which you will already have spoken to.
3) Have your eyetest.
4) The optician then sends the images to the S.M.D.R.T.
5) The S.M.D.R.T. then sends the images to another optician who checks
them and sends his results back to the S.M.D.R.T.
6) The S.M.D.R.T. then writes to you and tells you exactly what the optician
told you two weeks earlier.
There you have it, why use one person when a dozen will do. That's one way of dealing with job losses in the private sector; create them in the public sector instead.
