Dry-slope skiing trips

I really should read the Times (of London) more often. That way I’d find out more aout things like this:

[A] local council is employing staff to take fathers on dry-slope skiing trips to help them bond with their children and make them less “sexist.”

The post, based in Knowsley, Merseyside, is one of a welter of dubious jobs being created by the vast sums of taxpayers’ money that the government is pumping into the public sector.

Details of the job emerged during a four-month undercover investigation by The Sunday Times in which applications were made for 60 jobs involving “facilitation”, “evaluation”, “co-ordination” and “monitoring”. They included:

A “protected learning time facilitator” in Luton, Bedfordshire, whose task was to organise the temporary closure of all GP surgeries in the town;

A “monitoring and evaluation officer” in Nottingham, to check that play schemes for asylum seekers’ children are meeting government targets. He or she would be evaluated by yet another evaluator…

(continued p94, as Private Eye would say)

My theory? Any department, public or pricate, that is allocated a budget and finds that after all the necessary expenditure has been made for the year, there is an unspent residue, will invent ways of spending that residue. They do this because, if they don’t, there’s a chance their budget for the next year will be trimmed down to the level of the necessary expenditure, giving them little or no leeway. In other words, the public sector - at least in places - is not underfunded according to the definition given by those who work in it. It is overfunded, and these posts exist to try to conceal that fact.

I should crow too loudly though. My paycheque is covered by that most privileged of employers, an attractor of state funds and a registered charity - a British university. Though I can at least console myself with the knowledge that it is, by British standards, a university especially well-endowed by private funds.