Possible voluntary redundancy in the public service.

ceoltoir wrote: »

I'm very lucky to have a public service job. In my early sixties now but I want to give up my job, leave the city and live in the country. My pension will be quite small.

Wondering whether, due to the unfortunate circumstances of the past year, the public service will introduce a voluntary redundancy scheme in order to cut numbers.

Should I jump now or wait a while?

Unlikely to happen.

Departments are stretched with working from home.

I wouldn't be surprised if an offer comes up in towards the end of the year or beginning of next year.

My thinking behind it is, once the vaccine program fully rolls out, all going well every adult should have a vaccination by the end of summer, start of Autumn (fingers crossed). The government should have an idea of the long term damage of the economy and the jobs lost. They might start to look at cutting the PS wage bill. (Cheaper to have new hires than staff at the top of the scale) - Plenty of Public Jobs campaigns going on at the moment.

Then I think you will see some managers pushing people to get back into the office, this might in turn, push people to retire somewhat earlier than planned because they don't want to go back into the office and have gotten used to WFH. Depending on the number of staff that choose this option, the government then may offer a sweetener for others to join them.

I personally can't see it happening to be honest.

There are a lot of people due to retire over the coming couple of years. These are all people who started in 1979-80 or before that, and who are on the good salaries and good pensions. Significant numbers of people were taken on at that time. They will let these people retire and won't replace a good number of them.

And they have saved a lot of money over the last year by taking on far fewer TCOs. I can't see many TCOs being taken on this summer either.

They will also take advantage of people working from home and not renew certain building leases coming up for renewal. They now know they don't have to have buildings which accommodate 300-400 people.

drunkmonkey wrote:

They'll have to hit the public service some how, I'd expect voluntary redundancies at the very least, no way the private sector can carry the can alone for what's coming. I'm not believing this blockbuster recovery for the economy any time soon a lot of businesses are not viable anymore once Government supports are taken away. A lot working from home in either sector should be concerned as their jobs are prime for outsourcing.

There actually doesn't need to be major cuts in the public sector, in order to get the economy going again, yup we ve been putting way too much onto the private sector for that, we really should be expanding the public sector after this, in particular public debt, but since we ve convinced ourselves that this is the work of the devil.......

Op, maybe hold off for another few months, I'm expecting lots of dumb things to occur, such as deep public sector cuts, as soon as this is done, so you might get lucky. Best of luck

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