Quote of the Day

"There have been no redundancies in my Department since 1997... Nonetheless, there have been voluntary early releases." - Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Education and Skills, Parmjit Dhanda MP

For anyone remotely interested, those redundancies voluntary early releases totalled 968. Interestingly between 1997 and 2004 the average number each year was only 61, and then in 2004-2005 it was 332 followed by 204 the next year. Looks like there was a mass culling for some reason.

Still, it only cost the taxpayer just over £60 million in Civil Service Compensation payments (that's redundancy payment to normal people), that's approximately £60K per redundancy. Them civil servants negotiate good huh?