Oh I love non stories in the media, particularly when dealt with by people who don’t really understand what they were saying. This is a classic case of PUS not being particularly clear, and then being selectively misquoted to suit the ends of the media who love a good ‘evil idiot civil servant’ story.
What the PUS was trying to say, but just not very eloquently, is that there has been no need to impose mandatory job losses yet on the MOD CS because they have been overwhelmed by applicants wanting to leave (15000 last year for barely 5000 places). I still expect to see further compulsory redundancies as the MOD has to shrink to at least 53000 and possibly 44000 in the next 5 years.
To give some context for the MOD cuts, at present the MOD CS is losing more staff by 2015 than all of the armed forces combined are expected to lose by 2020 – 1 in 3 of us are losing our jobs.
Before people go on about redundancy payments, I did the sums and worked out that my military peer, who sits alongside me would get nearly 3 times the lump sum that I'd get in the event of compulsory redundancy. When you add in the broadly higher pay that the forces receive, and you quickly realise that the idea that the military is being seen off compared to the CS is just a myth.
When she said flexible, I suspect she meant that it is easier to move CS to posts around the country in a general manpower plot. We did this a while ago, but essentially the CS operates as a vast mixyblob of staff, broken down purely by grade – subject to a slightly odd job vacancy procedure, anyone can apply for any advertised job in their grade. So, you could theoretically move
London – Scotland – Devonport doing 3 very different jobs. This is unlikely, but what it means is that as most CS jobs tend to be quite similar, its easier to cross appoint a manager of paperclips at RAF little Snoring to become manager of paperclips and photocopiers at an Army barracks in Scotland.
The difference between this and the forces is that the forces branch structures are much smaller, and except at entry level require much more complex technical training. So, while you could theoretically take an infantry sgt, tell him he’s being made redundant, but then tell him he can apply to retrain as a REME Sgt, I’d suggest it would take a long time for him to retrain to the professional skills required to do the job properly.
This is what Ursula was trying to get at – Armed Forces personnel are highly trained in very technical skills. They operate in small branches with manpower worked out to offer a career structure to people coming through the system. While it is feasible for them to retrain, it would take a long time to do so, and would cost a lot of money, and lead to a black hole of manpower emerging as experienced staff went back to near basic training to learn a new job. The CS by contrast is mainly technically unskilled office work, which requires staffing skills, but rarely technical knowledge. As such it is easier to move CS around the country to new locations to try new jobs because it won’t take 2-3 years to retrain them to do this.
Longer blog piece on this later, but it’s another example of people chosing not to understand the message they’ve been told.