UK Civil & Public Service Collapse

Ditto, @anon2524019 could you edit that post that Véro is referring to and please remove the personal attack.

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Hello @billybutcher

Post edited as per your request.

Not being Fred Astaire I’m going to tread on the occasional toe now and then, it’s a human trait I have.

No issues on my part, you didn’t like what I wrote, you asked me to remove what I wrote and I’ve deleted it.

It’s a new day.

As the old Irish saying goes “Blessed are the flexible, for they never get bent out of shape”.

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Excellent, thanks.

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Post deleted - my apologies if it was inappropriate.

I’d be highly obliged if you would leave your analysis of other posters aside please Brian. I’ve had to deal with fallout already today from comments made in a similar vein and they are not helpful . Thanks.

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Not at all I can take criticism, but I am sensitive

Apologies, Cat. It was not meant as analysis, just to clarify what the poster meant. However, I’m happy to withdraw the comment

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Apology accepted

It gets worse…

The queues outside are a publicly visible sign of the dilapidated state, people indignantly eager to tell stories that seem to signal the collapse of public services… cuts to environmental inspections of water, air and agriculture are hair-raising.

How strange. Just renewed mine. It came through promptly - 6 weeks maybe, which I think is very good.

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I would imagine - given the backlog - that they have implemented some sort of triage system, allowing them to clear the straightforward cases more quickly. There are likely to be regional differences too, based on the ease of recruitment.

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When I renewed mine at the at the end of last year/start of this I kept an eye on https://www.passportwaitingtime.co.uk/, or rather the forum section, and as you say there seemed to be a huge variance in time depending on which office it was sent to. All international ones go to Durham, whereas applications from within the U.K. can go anywhere, and seemingly then can shift internally too, there were a number of cases of people being told to send documents and old passports to one office then when complaining or such discovering that it was actually being processed by an entirely different office at the other end of the country. The whole system seemed a complete mess back when I applied and if these reports are to be believed has got significantly worse since then.

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I love articles like this - detailed, forensic examination of exactly how and why the UK environment agency service is collapsing:

Water companies were polluting Britain’s rivers on an almost unimaginable scale, and yet the regulatory agencies had completely failed to spot it… How could such a monumental failure have occurred?

Government ministers… point out that the Environment Agency has 10,500 staff and a generous budget of £1.6bn a year. If the agency isn’t doing the job demanded of it, they say, the fault lies with its managers, not with elected politicians. Superficially, it looks as if they have a point, because the government’s funding for the EA has indeed grown by 20% in the past five years.

However, if you delve beyond the headline figures, you see that the vast majority of the government’s funding is allocated exclusively for flood defences, while the money ringfenced for environmental protection has been cut by 80% since 2010. Over the same period, the annual enforcement budget has fallen from £11.6m to £7m – £100,000 less than the sum earmarked for the EA to manage issues around Brexit in 2019-20.

As the enforcement budget has shrunk, so have prosecutions. Today, if a company violates environmental regulations, it needs not worry much about the consequences. In 2007-8, the number of prosecutions brought by the EA reached a peak of nearly 800; by 2020-21, that number had fallen to just 17.

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I never really could understand why taxpayers’ money was used to provide flood defences to developers who chose to build on flood plains, and those who bought from them.

Flood defences, in most cases, are like King Canute trying to hold back the waves. Far too expensive for the benefit. Just don’t allow building on a flood plain.

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build on the land at Chequers and Dorneywood grace and favour mansions instead :grin:

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The Environment Agency has a huge remit…from water regulation and flood defence, to contaminated land, waste management, conservation.

So this seemingly huge staff is spread extremely thin. 1 person for 24,000 sq km of the UK.

Many of my friends used to work for Natural England, Environment Agency, Historic England, those sorts of bodies. The majority have taken early retirement in disgust (as I did).

Yes - I think I described earlier in this thread trying to sort out a problem with HMRC, and being told quite openly by a very disillusioned staff member that not only were they short-staffed, but ‘all our most experienced people have left’.

wasn’t it also the case that when Wooster-Mugg complained recently that civil servants were not at their desks and they should stop working from home, the actual truth is that of the majority of the major State departments the are something in the order of only 50% of desk space for the full complement of civil service staff in the first place :roll_eyes: