The Autumn Spending Review

Over Clocker said:
PFI was a disastrous waste of public money brought about by Labour governments, which we're paying the price for.

Yes, we got new schools and hospitals, but at what price?

Sorry, do not know the point you are trying to make?
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It is all part of the debt. Hence why the old man said it needs to be renegotiated. I assumed you never heard part of the prices since it is linked to his part.
 
Caged said:
The problem is that it's impossible to provide a safety net without it being open to abuse since we're in a developed country and the idea of leaving people to starve or go without a home is (or should be) unpalatable. You just need to hope that the people who take the mick are statistically small - and despite the Daily Mail dragging out a family of 20 living off the state, that tends to be the case.

On the point of you running an SME, your job is to make as much money as possible and if you employ people as anything other than a last resort due to increased customer demand, or a desire to go into a new area (in search of increased profits) then you're doing it wrong. The same with putting back into the economy - that should be a side-effect and not a target. I don't blame you for any of that stuff as it's the system you have to work with, but it's very easy for company directors to claim that they are the providers of employment, when in fact it's ultimately the consumers of the goods or services that provide the demand which drives everything else. If the demand exists and you aren't employing more staff to meet it, that job still gets created - it just happens at one of your competitors.

On the point of increased productivity, my understanding was that a large amount of cash was encouraged to be lent by banks to companies such as yours with the idea of investment in newer technologies to improve that, but the cash never really materialised. Unfortunately a lot of SMEs see efficiency meaning "spend as little as possible", which is almost the worst thing you could do, and as a result the productivity figures look terrible.
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Yes of course, I'm running a business, not a charity. No one would pay more tax than they absolutely had to.

However, by the government enabling us to pay a couple of percent less tax, it allows us to invest more heavily in our staffing levels, staff training etc etc.

People need money to by things
The then buy things from businesses
Businesses employ people
People earn money so can buy things

Rinse and repeat. The economy is stimulated by people having money to spend. How they get that money is what matter. State handouts - false economy. Work to earn it - positive economy. Government cuts (in the right places), help to make the above happen by freeing up funds for spending in the right places.

Of course, it is a huge balancing act and not everything can be achieved in the right places.
 
Over Clocker said:
Yes of course, I'm running a business, not a charity. No one would pay more tax than they absolutely had to.

However, by the government enabling us to pay a couple of percent less tax, it allows us to invest more heavily in our staffing levels, staff training etc etc.

People need money to by things
The then buy things from businesses
Businesses employ people
People earn money so can buy things

Rinse and repeat. The economy is stimulated by people having money to spend. How they get that money is what matter. State handouts - false economy. Work to earn it - positive economy. Government cuts (in the right places), help to make the above happen by freeing up funds for spending in the right places.

Of course, it is a huge balancing act and not everything can be achieved in the right places.
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Yet there are so many companies going bust. Do you hear that?
 
V F said:
It is all part of the debt. Hence why the old man said it needs to be renegotiated. I assumed you never heard part of the prices since it is linked to his part.
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Yup, I did, and I know it too well. We have lost out on projects because of the way PFI was run. Some contracts are being re-negotiated in fact, but still in the wrong ways.

My company can supply IT services to a school for £x. PFI provider X supplies a WORSE service at £x multiplied by 4, but still gets the contract!

Unfortunately Labour allowed for some ridiculous 25 year contracts to be written which take a lot of time, money and expertise for schools to come out. Time, money and expertise they do not have.
 
Over Clocker said:
Yes of course, I'm running a business, not a charity. No one would pay more tax than they absolutely had to.

However, by the government enabling us to pay a couple of percent less tax, it allows us to invest more heavily in our staffing levels, staff training etc etc.

People need money to by things
The then buy things from businesses
Businesses employ people
People earn money so can buy things

Rinse and repeat. The economy is stimulated by people having money to spend. How they get that money is what matter. State handouts - false economy. Work to earn it - positive economy. Government cuts (in the right places), help to make the above happen by freeing up funds for spending in the right places.

Of course, it is a huge balancing act and not everything can be achieved in the right places.
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A shift of a couple of percent gives you extra funds which you choose to re-invest in staff or training, yes, but ultimately you do it with an end goal in mind.

If those tax changes didn't happen, would you be content to run with a workforce that weren't trained as well as you'd like them to be, or were running close to 100% capacity all the time due to there only just being enough of them, or would you take the hit on training/staffing with a view that it would improve future prospects?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not crapping on SMEs - they are the backbone of the economy, don't have the luxury of deciding they are Luxembourg based for tax reasons, and can't buy politicians. But like you said, it's not a charity. You do what's best for the business, and if that means paying staff more, employing more of them, or training them then that's a great side-effect.
 
Moses said:
That depends on what your opinion is when it comes to making money. The best way isn't necessarily as you describe...
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What would you suggest? Employ more staff than needed out of goodwill? Sure fire way to fail and have to sack all staff.

On a grander scale, that is similar to the last Labour government employing so many more people than needed into state jobs........
 
Caged said:
A shift of a couple of percent gives you extra funds which you choose to re-invest in staff or training, yes, but ultimately you do it with an end goal in mind.

If those tax changes didn't happen, would you be content to run with a workforce that weren't trained as well as you'd like them to be, or were running close to 100% capacity all the time due to there only just being enough of them, or would you take the hit on training/staffing with a view that it would improve future prospects?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not crapping on SMEs - they are the backbone of the economy, don't have the luxury of deciding they are Luxembourg based for tax reasons, and can't buy politicians. But like you said, it's not a charity. You do what's best for the business, and if that means paying staff more, employing more of them, or training them then that's a great side-effect.
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I think we're actually making the same points so not sure why we're questioning each other lol.

Except for one item, when taxation was higher, I was FORCED to work my staff harder and longer. I am now able to employ more staff and train them better.

It's not a case of doing one or the other. You would end up balancing staffing, training and your bottom figure and personal take. It's just that balance changes.

Mal
 
I'd go out on a limb and suggest that the time when you were forced to work your staff harder and not invest as much in training as you'd have liked was also a time when the likelihood of them jumping ship to your competitors was slim since the pressure was being felt equally as much across your industry. Ultimately you do what you need to do to remain competitive and sometimes that means more staff, better trained staff, higher paid staff.

I think we are making the same points.
 
Presumably though that's just a differing view on what represents "enough" staff and not a differing view on whether to employ people for fun or not (I am aware that's an over-simplification).

If you don't have enough staff/some other contingency in place to prevent deliverables being delayed if you are subjected to the industry/region/demographic average for sickness then I'd argue that's not enough staff. Likewise if things regularly go wrong and you don't have enough staff to make it right, then you don't have enough staff for the way your business normally operates.

I don't think we're finding example of where a company would employ more staff than absolutely necessary, we're just redefining "absolutely necessary" to mean different things based on whether a company is going to focus on quality or price.
 
Caged said:
Labour's economic policies regarding banking regulation had support from both sides of the house.

Running a government surplus large enough to nationalise investment banks on the off chance that it's required would have been foolish. There's no such thing as "past our means" - the fact we were still able to borrow the funds and service the repayments means it was within our means.

Labour did a lot wrong, but they didn't cause a recession. The Tories love to trot out the line that government can tank an economy which is intrinsically linked to global conditions. But when asked to explain why Osborne misses his own self-made targets then suddenly the economy is an unwieldy beast that is hard to tame.
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England was part of that global economy that Labour and Labourites like to forget entirely. It's almost as if London and the banking that happened here had no bearing on the global economy at all therefore policies under Labour had no effect. THe recession happened thus it must have happened here.

It's not at all possible that if England hadn't had such a disaster and the banks were stronger amongst general spending in the UK that the recession may not have happened at all? The reality is, not likely, the absolutely likely scenario is the recession could have been FAR less bad for the UK and probably the world to some degree if not for Labour's horrific government running.

People like to pretend the recession caused all the problems here and that is the end of it. No Labours horrific overspending on some truly awful public works meant we were spending billions on things that had no long term pay back.

Spending 2billion on a train that brings business to somewhere in the country(not arguing HS2 will, just a the concept) can bring future tax income to surpass the spending on it. Billions on a ID scheme which gets canned because it's both ineffective, no one wants it and it doesn't work has NO long term jobs to bring, no tax income, not even a service. If the money spent on an ID scheme absolutely no one wanted was spent on something else, we would have been in a better state. Billions on late NHS systems that were eventually cancelled and basically thrown away, same deal. Had the system worked and been handled competently then the NHS could have been running better now, giving better service to patients and quicker/easier IT for the staff. Instead that money was thrown away.


Also don't forget the drastic expansion of jobs paid out of tax rather than jobs paying into tax. The government under Labour shrunk everywhere that mattered, wasted money on things that had no long term benefit for the country at all, drastically increased red tape and backroom staff in the NHS. Anyone remotely serious would tell you it was a joke and half the backroom staff could have gone. But increase spending, throw people, change stats so they look better and temporarily reduce unemployment and woo, everyone wins.

You then get into the budget game, a LOT of departments(not Labours fault, just a world issue) is that department heads want to get the same or increased budgets because budgets are seen as power. The guy with the 5mil budget for his department is more important than the guy with the 3mil budget. So people lie, cook stats and basically try and bump up their department 'needs' to stay 'powerful'. The NHS is a mess, largely Labour's fault.

All of this had a huge effect on how deep and how long the recession was and how long it will take to recover.
 
How did government spending encourage investment banks based here to act recklessly :confused:. Either I'm reading your post wrong or you seem to think that had Labour spent less money then the global recession might not have been so bad. I don't follow your logic, sorry.

You could claim that we could have weathered the recession a bit if we weren't so reliant on our financial services sector, but those seeds were sewn a long time before Blair turned up.
 
To be fair, the uK needs cuts, to much is being wasted. Also if it upsets the loony left along the way, that can only be a good thing.
 
The Tories are always parroting the party line that Osborne has done such a great job and our economy is growing faster and better than everyone else...

So why are we still needing to slash services?

Meanwhile, the axe will fall on council services such as waste collection and libraries, as well as transport, elderly care, college training, police and fire service funding
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Most of those hardly seem non-essential services and things we do expect the state to provide for us.
 
Over Clocker said:
And there is still a lot of waste and inefficiencies too which can be slashed from the public sector. Slashing waste = better services.
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Yep, unfortunately by and large this is what happens. Everyone tries protecting themselfs, HR departments have been cut so much. They can't enforce policy and sack useless people.
So many managers have been Internally recruited who are just pants and can't manage to save their lives. Then haven't been given training.
Contracts that anyone working for such companies can see is a total scam and over paying. The co tracts are shocking, think public sector must use 1st year law students to make what can be multi billion pound contracts. Then a selection commit who have no interest on if they can actually fulfil contract, as they can just shove more money when it fails.
 
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OldCoals said:
So, are these changes idealogical driven or what the nation needs?
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both

though I'm sure there will be plenty of butt hurt from the left 'muh benefits'

meanwhile he's also supposedly going to be cracking down on contractors, hopefully further plans to tackle corporate tax avoidance too
 
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