Wasting the money

IT WAS Chancellor George Osborne who told the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to slash its budget by 29% 2015.

According to Mary Creagh, Labour's Shadow Environment Secretary, Defra has spent £70 million on making people redundant since the General Election, Alan Tilbury tells us.

Cash for waterways

We all know that amongst many other things Defra provides cash for the waterways, cash as we also all know is very much in short supply.

After the spending review last October, it was estimated that Defra and its many agencies could loose around 8,000 jobs from its 30,000 work force, and that it would be 'substantially reformed'.

Continued to hire

Since the General Election 17 months ago, Defra has cut 1,700 posts to comply with the requirement, spending a average of £39,167 on every one of the redundancies—but instead of re-deploying these self same people has continued to hire new staff.

It has spent £70 million on redundancy payments but at the same time has recruited nearly 600 new staff!  And that despite a jobs freeze.  It's agency, British Waterways, too is guilty of the same—creating new posts whilst making redundancies. It's Annual Report stated it had made 100 of its staff redundant last year.

Parliamentary questions

This method of tackling redundancies by Defra and its agencies, was exposed in Government answers to written Parliamentary questions.

Redundancies costing a total of £69.6 million were the result of 1,777 people leaving Defra and its quangos since May last year. At the same time, 584 new staff have been recruited, despite a jobs freeze.