Re: The Problem with the Civil Service.
I get the impression that most contributors to this thread think that Civil Servants are highly-paid Crown employees working in Whitehall .....
AFAIK, there are some 500,000 civil servants working nationwide working in a variety of jobs and being paid a variety of salaries.
I live in the North-West and, after I retired, I took temporary positions at the DWP, the Insolvency Service and the Land Registry, thus becoming a Civil Servant. The positions, although administrative, were all contractual, a system that was replacing "jobs for life", so although positions are relatively well-paid, job security, AFAIK, has become a thing of the past. In the North-West, this has affected some 50,000 people, including those in the Prison Service and HMRC. As money for departments runs short (or even out), as it frequently does nowadays, job contracts are not renewed or employees are relocated elsewhere in the UK.
Many of my colleagues were Administrative Assistants or Administrative Officers earning, some 10 years ago, between £12,000 and £20,000 - not a huge amount but enough to sustain life (and some luxuries) - now hundreds of people that I worked with, all civil servants, are unemployed.
Those in Whitehall may fret about the office desk or the carpet but my colleagues are more concerned about food and clothes for children.