September 11, 2009 8:00am by David Farrar

A good start

“Between December and June this year, the number of fulltime equivalent (FTE) staff positions within the core government administration cap reduced by 1402, while numbers in frontline services outside of the cap have increased.”

Excellent. Considering the Government is having to borrow almost $10 billion a year, it is imperative expenditure be restrained so that we do not have massive tax hikes in the future to pay for the interest on all the debt.

The reduction of 1,402 positions comprised 757 vacancies disestablished and 645 FTE employee positions. Approximately 60 percent of the decrease was through managed attrition, 21 percent through seasonal variation and 18 percent through redundancies.

It is also good only 18% are redundancies. Regardless of the overall fiscal need, it is never pleasant to have your job made redundant and managed attrition is preferable.

However, the frontline of the Public Service, which was not included in the cap, saw an increase of 173 FTE positions, driven by improvements to service delivery at Community Probation & Psychological Services and Work & Income.

There are also increases planned or occurring in frontline services in Police, Corrections and the Ministry of Social Development.

As I said, a good start. The challenge is to keep it up for the entire term.

There’s also been a 10% reduction in the number of communications staff in the public sector.