That’s rather troubling because I thought it was a separate scheme in addition to an existing general internship.
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Why is my question too.
Just seems odd
The most charitable reason I can think of is that they don’t list any internships which have already been filled, i.e. the problem they’re trying to solve here is even more obvious because despite having positions available, there are insufficient qualified candidates for this internship, which explains the requirement for it to begin with. Create the demand, and hope that the supply comes through.
Otherwise, now that I’ve written the above, it also makes sense if the whole point is to demonstrate to people from minority ethnic backgrounds that such a career is viable for them. Work experience under another name perhaps.
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Click through the links, they offer other internship schemes.
It is.
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The EA and its associated offshoots NRW and SEPA are short stafffed in areas that require expertise. Their work scope is huge and demands a lot of people. Pay levels are quite poor though compared to what that same person would get at a consultancy.
So as you say they’re trying to appeal to as wide a spectrum as possible even by trying to be specific in certain areas.
Despite this they (NRW in this case) still cant make certain ventures work. The trail centre at Coed y Brenin for example. They’re trying to sell it.
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I think the only other internship available on that page is the Chief Scientist’s Group Internship, which reads to me like a very much more specialised internship?
My bad, yes. It was the apprenticeships page I was looking at.
Race specific ones?
What are your thoughts on this?
It seems to lack any real detail and to me is a way of passing responsibility onto underfunded Councils. The only positive I can see is that you can use the same payment system across multiple means of transport.
Giving the Mayors powers to decide how often trains run is pointless, requiring extra civil servants, at a cost to the tax payer who have the power to do nothing. Telling a train operator to run trains at certain times or more often will only incur costs, which will be passed onto the public and you need an infrastructure to support this.
In Birmingham/midlands we already have a centralised department the WMCA. They were planning to build the Digbeth extension in time for the Common wealth games, still not live and even looking like opening soon, estimated 2025 brought forward from a revised date of 2027.
They also had to close the City centre for a while because of cracks in the Tram carriages and also relay large portions of track due to it being wrong, not fit for purpose/unsafe.
Don’t get me wrong, I am in full support of giving more powers to local councils, letting them make their own decisions but Birmingham City Council is the largest in Europe and is also £2.9bn in debt, and with that I do not see how merging councils will help.
Please don’t take my concerns as being against the Government, as I couldn’t care who was in power if it meant them sorting out the problems.
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The original article suggests Liverpool as one of the models for how it should work. I do find Merseytravel to be a pretty good system. Whenever I am in Merseyside, I usually just dump the car and use a Saveaway card. With some other cities, the public transport is impenetrable.
I’d say that the advantages of local administration is that it provides what is needed locally, whereas a national system has uniformity and economies of scale.
What would you suggest?
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It’s a White paper. I think the details usually follow later but greater devolution was I think a manifesto commitment, so not surprised this will include transport. Funding discussions will also presumably come later once there is more detail.
Local tax payers, and service users, are probably better able to influence services if the decision making is local than if it remained centralised at the national level. If it works, fewer civil servants at the national level may be needed.
Can’t speak about Birmingham CC directly on how they handle their finances, although I remember they were caught up in one or two expensive legal cases. There is always going to be a risk of financial mismanagement somewhere, so it is important to have the right controls in place.
Generally speaking, though over the last 14 years Local Authorities have seen a growing demand on their services but significantly reduced funding from central government. Much of what the local authorities do have to spend is directed by Central government (I think I read somewhere it is as high as 80-90%?).
Presumably the expectation is that by merging councils’ resources can be freed up and local decision making simplified/ made faster.
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- completely agree.
I actually stated in my original reply that “I understand it is only a white paper”, for some I removed it 
.
I think devolution has potential, ideally you want the people you vote for in the local elections to actually have a say. I just worry that this will only create more barriers.
How exactly? The train operators are private companies. They are already influenced by service users, which is why they run trains to where and when to maximise profits. We can suggest as much as we want, we all know it will come at a cost.
It is important to have the right controls in place, but unfortunately there is a history of failure in this at Local levels.
So, re: BCC
The equal pay legal case is the main issue, which occurred in 2010-2012 under a Coalition council (Tory/Libs).
Since 2012 it has been Labour run, who have made bad decisions, one being the Oracle IT system, estimated cost £19m eventual cost £100m and it went live, untested, a failure of this system means the council don’t even know what they own/owe. I have posted a link below.
Birmingham council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle debacle • The Register.
Ironically, Labour council leader John Cotton, who was in New York when BCC submitted Bankruptcy also blamed the Tories for 14 years of underfunding - it is getting a bit boring now - have a google on the Athletes village fiasco for Birmingham Common Wealth.
To be clear, I am not laying the blame on one party, it is a combination of all parties and across a number of councils. The issues I have listed aren’t down to reduced funding. It is down to bad management at local council level.
I don’t see how this is possible when you are merging councils of different demographics, economics and political leaders.
Obviously, this will be explained in the White Paper and I really hope they have the answer but I just don’t see it.
I really don’t know.
I agree with local administration, but it is not a one solution fits all. Also, if I have understood the principle of the idea correctly, it could actually remove power from Local councils.
For example - and this is hypothetical without knowing the ins and outs - you amalgamate Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley, Doncaster and Chesterfield under one umbrella Council.
You may save money by centralising resources but who makes the decisions on where the budget is divided up and where the money is spent?
You cite your experience of Liverpool/Merseyside as a good experience. If that is the case why meddle with it. Why spend money trying to integrate/convert systems, it just seems like it could create more problems than it would solve, at a cost and increase the levels of blame.
I am definitely no Economics expert and I don’t know how feasible it would be, but maybe the Government could payoff all Council debts of approx £97.8bn and start a fresh, but with a proper audit and better management. Currently councils are spending 15% of their budgets on interest repayments, Birmingham Cities Councils budget is £4.2bn, so you are looking at £630m, with a current budget shortfall of £300m
Nb. I understand it is not as simple as made out above.
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The strike is over rest day working practices/policies.
Isn’t that self-contradictory? What I understand from this is that they’re reorganising the whole system of local government.
They are essentially deleting both county councils and district councils, replacing them with something in-between in size in the form of unitary authorities, but instead of having that two-tier (should he really be called single-tier Keir now then) system, there will simply be one body of local government, which should in theory be more streamlined. It would possibly also deal with that whole canard of local councils being filled only with busybodies and power-trippers, since it would be a larger body, with more powers. The tricky bit is getting the size balance right, large enough to be efficient, but small enough to still retain that local bits.
They’re not going to do this underfunded either. If I remember correctly, one thing that Labour has been talking about for a while now is about funding local government appropriately, which the Conservatives, no matter whatever you want to say, have not done well.
Ideally this should lead to these unitary authorities becoming more important relative to central government, with the appropriate spending power, and hopefully more democratic involvement from local residents. The article cites a size of around 500k people, which should hopefully be a good size.
The experience of Transport for London says otherwise, as well as all the other more recent developments in this area. They don’t arbitrarily decide how often trains run, there’s actually a whole process to go through that examines demand and also capacity. What it does however is give local government more power to regulate and control these services, so that instead of simply servicing existing demand, it can actually create new demand by, for example, giving people new bus routes in places where existing bus services do not cover, which is often a self-perpetuating cycle since people who do not get regular bus services would be more likely to buy cars and hence have less of a need for such bus services.
EDIT: On the earlier point, the following already are unitary authorities:
- Bristol
- Buckinghamshire
- Cornwall
- Dorset
- Durham
- East Riding of Yorkshire
- Herefordshire
- Isle of Wight
- North Yorkshire
- Northumberland
- Rutland
- Shopshire
- Somerset
- Wiltshire
So it’s hardly unprecedented, it’s just really bringing the whole country in line with that system.
This says hi.
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I think there is some merit to this. Not least of which is that central government interest is likely to be much lower.
I’d definitely agree with the audit bit as much of the mismanagement followed the disbanding of the Audit Commission in England.
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Exactly what the Tories said.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves defends the government’s decision not to pay compensation in the “Waspi” pension case
She says “given that the vast majority of people did know about these changes, I didn’t judge that it would be the best use of taxpayers’ money”.
Waspi campaigner Jan Fulster has shown pictures of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall supporting Waspi campaigners.
“It just feels as if it’s all been a lie,” she says.
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