“Sorry - I meant to say council. Got carried away and in front of myself.”

“ex councillor worker, my house - very very cute indeed!”

“A company discovered they were losing 235k worth of stock so they employ a night watchman on 15k a year. Obviously the night watchman needs a supervisor, so one is hired at 30k a year. The supervisor needs a manager to make sure he is looking after the watchman, so one is hired at 45k a year. As there are now 3 workers a human resources manager has to be hired at 60k a year, to make sure that the manager is managing the supervisor. Then a CEO is hired to make sure the HR manager is doing his job properly at 100k a year. However it is then realised that its now costing 250k to save 235k so the night watchman is fired!!!

Sound familiar??”

“Steve,

Having worked in the private sector, in manufacturing, for the last 44 years, I cannot agree with your facile analysis. In both the public and the private sectors there has been a remorseless rise in overheads and a decline in productivity, coupled to an exponential increase in remuneration at the top, with no measurable improvement in outcome. From your figures on turnover and staff levels, I calculate that you have £200k turnover per employee. This means that business is either in the retail sector, with very high gross margins, or a law firm!
You might care to consider how that gross margin is generated - either by low prices paid to your suppliers, or excessive prices paid by your customers. The private sector is full of companies pushing junk products at vastly inflated prices, now I cannot call that efficient! Neither is it capitalism, except in terms of the perverted form exported from America, for which we have all just been presented the bill for £8000 per head. I see little or no difference between management in the public and private business sectors - both have behaved in a monumentaly greedy and selfish way since the 1980s, with a complete disregard for the fortunes of their employees. And as for transparency and shareholder power in the private sector - have you ever been to a shareholders meeting and seen the total disregard of the directors with respect to critisism from the floor? I have in the case of the lamented Marconi company, where the board had turned a £4.5bn cash mountain into £6.5bn of debt!
Before the private sector criticises the public sector performance too closely, it needs to deal with the stench from its own Aegean stables - now that is a Herculean task!”

“""my company has a turn over of £12bn and employs over 60k staff. "

Clearly not too busy if has time to rubbish comments from a concerned former elected member who gave up his free time for 10 years and an employee for 33 years.

Methinks its is the non-domiciled Lord A pouring millions into Cameron's coffers to help his takeover bid from Belize to run UK ltd.”