David Davis has been accused of running a Brexit department in a state of chaos, with 140 key posts unfilled as the UK enters the crucial second stage of negotiations with the EU, figures seen by The Independent show.
The vacancies led Labour to criticise the department as “utterly disorganised” and running an “underpowered” Brexit operation nine months on from triggering Article 50.
In total, there are 143 empty jobs, almost one in four of the posts at the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU), with economist, finance and project management jobs – as well as 81 policy roles – unfilled.
It comes after separate figures showed that the department is suffering from a high turnover of staff, with almost one in 10 moving on every three months – a turnover rate normally seen every 12 months in normally functioning Whitehall departments.
An astonishing 44 per cent of DExEU employees plan to leave within the next year, a civil service survey found, suggesting the recruitment crisis is set to worsen.
The picture has emerged as fears grow in Brussels that the Government’s stance on the “end state” it seeks for a final Brexit deal is a muddle, with the Cabinet only beginning to discuss its proposals this week.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 23361.html
If there are any civil servants here, and I know Canny is one, I urge you not to apply for one of these vacancies it's simply not worth the stress.
Everyone who does economic forecasting knows that the assumptions are everything, it's how realistic the assumptions are that govern how reliable the forecast will be. People trumpet how bad the forecast were following the vote to leave forgetting that the assumption was David Cameron would trigger Article 50 as soon as the result was in, that assumption wasn't thought up by the forecasters it was an assumption we were told to factor in, and the reason David Cameron did not trigger Article 50 were other forecasts that showed how things improved exponentially the more we deferred the A50 vote. That's nothing new, we spent years in the treasury telling George Osborne that an assumption of over 2% productivity increase per employee was wildly optimistic but we carried out the forecast anyway and the projection of when the deficit would reduce was always - well let's just leave it a wildly optimistic - politics isn't our job and how that unrealistic expectation coloured political messages is for you to decide.
Similarly with Brexit we are tasked with carrying out sector assessments based on assumptions that are speculative at best and even they show a high probability that things will not go at all well. More pertinent to the staff turnover is the amount of pressure applied to fudge the maths, to bring in unverified and very dubious datasets and to entirely discount known causal relationships in order to paint a better picture every time some politician has a brain fart about how good things will be when we leave the EU.
A common joke about economic forecasting concerns the difference between mathematics and economic forecasting.
Maths, the joke runs, tells us that 2 + 2 = 4, economic forecasts tell us when it will equal 3 and why it will equal 5.
In the Department for Exiting the EU you will be asked to explain HOW it will make 36.72 and if you're a person with some math skills who is up for that kind of challenge I recommend trying something easier, like proving Fermat's Last Theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem
