Sandwell Council will be opening its doors on 1st December in the hope of luring a whole new crop of bureaucrats to their ranks.
The date for their careers event is advertised in the Halesowen News, where deputy council leader Pauline Hilton also boasts:
"As the largest employer in Sandwell we are committed to promoting jobs for residents."
Sandwell does not have impressive rates of employment and the council certainly has a role to play with regards to encouraging people into jobs, but hoping to hit employment targets by absorbing more and more recruits into the council itself is a costly mistake. Business should create jobs, not local government.
Sandwell ought to be looking at creating a smaller, more efficient council with better management and better lines of communication, to avoid becoming a bloated monolith that seeks to solve problems by taking on more and more staff.
The more surplus jobs this council create (and they’ve already been featured on our ‘non-job of the week’ blog), the more costly the whole operation becomes. Of course these extra costs will also, ironically, hit any new employees via taxation. It’s a destructive practice and, no matter what the good intentions are behind this employment drive, if Sandwell Council truly want to create jobs for those without they must dedicate their efforts to making the area more attractive to investors rather than ‘opening their doors’ to the jobless of the area.