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By Austin Mitchell MP - 17th May 2011
Concentrating public services and public servants in larger towns is disruptive and damaging, writes Austin Mitchell MP.
The effort to secure efficiency savings by concentrating public services and public servants in larger centres and withdrawing them from smaller centres has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished.
I'm using the proposals of HMRC and the Valuation Agency to move staff out of Grimsby as examples to criticise a general trend which is disruptive to staff, damaging to Grimsby and the other smaller centres on which it`s being imposed, and which doesn`t even save money.
Grimsby is a town with a higher than average level of unemployment and a real need for a better employment mix. We've got too few white collar managerial and professional jobs to leaven the lump and the employment prospects for young people are too limited.
Yet the government is withdrawing all too many of the few white collar and professional workers we've got and transferring them to cities with a better employment mix where life is more expensive.
It makes no social sense and less economic sense. The travelling expenses of staff who have to travel to work for more than an hour and a quarter, as they will to any centre in reach of Grimsby, have to be paid for five years. Office space costs less per square foot in Grimsby than in bigger centres.
Yet the concentration policy drives on remorselessly and mindlessly, ignoring all these facts, as well as the wishes of the staff who`re being shuffled about willy nilly.
They know, as I do, that Grimsby is a good place to live. Any sensible departmental policy would be transferring public services and public servants to Grimsby to live better lives far more economically than in those pressured hell holes, the big cities.
Austin Mitchellhas been Labour MP for Great Grimsby, Yorkshire and Humberside since 1977.
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