How bad will the Budget be?

In the same way that without the public sector there'd be no schools, NHS, armed forces, emergency services, rubbish collection, street sweeping, actual streets or indeed any of the infrastructure that you take for granted.

So by that token, the public sector is also productive.

Not if they over employ , especially on pet projects and waste more money than they accumulate.

Just how productive is the public sector to the UK economy compared to the private sector? And how much wastage is foisted upon the average private taxpayer who keeps them in a job, with a secure pension and what not?

You still don't get it. Doesn't matter what your anecdotal evidence is. For every 2 of her there is probably at least 1 bludger who is carried by the likes of her, or who even earns double her salary and produces next to nothing.

You speak as though my lived experience means every single soul who works in the public sector should be thrown on the scrap heap. Which of course, is completely silly. Yes, Tescos may waste food, not sure how that relates to money exactly, or even compared to profits,  but is a possibility. Yet,  your average SME cannot afford such wastage when compared to Tescos, and Tescos cannot afford such wastage compared to the public sector.  

Well like many others I was convinced that there was going to be a big fuel duty increase which would of course have hit many working people. So I was very pleasantly surprised and indeed pleased that she did not do that for precisely the reasons I stated, that it would have hurt millions of working people.

The big minimum wage increase was welcome to me since the new rate would be nearly 20p an hour more than my current hourly rate, and my employers' desire to not be known as a minimum wage employer has thus far always resulted in a pay award that lifts us well above the minimum. No guarantee of that latter continuing but Tesco very much does not want to be known as just another minimum wage employer, so I have good hopes that the minimum wage increase will have a beneficial knock on on my pay.

The continued freeze on tax thresholds hits me hard though, because it guarantees that I pay full tax on every pound of any increase. So any pay rise I get the government takes 28 percent of. They made a virtue out of the fact that they were not going to extend the threshold freeze beyond 2028 as the Tories planned to to. But that is still four years threshold freezes to come. And the cynic in me immediately notices that the threshold freeze ceases just in time for the next election, and not before.

This freeze of course hurts working people of two main types. The low paid, ever larger numbers of whom will be seeing a greater proportion of their incomes becoming taxable. And those on middling salaries who will increasingly be seeing themselves paying a growing part of their incomes at the higher rate.

As someone with a host of medical conditions, the extra NHS funding is of course welcome, but since I am struggling with work so much more than I once did, and the days in which I am going to be able to continue working are numbered, I do have concerns about the future of sickness benefits. I am after all still 7 years and 8 months away from a state pension. And the goalposts have been shifted for me since I left school expecting to retire at 65 and now that age has been raised to 67.

I gave up smoking 20 years ago so taxes on tobacco do not impact me at all, and I do not drink much alcohol. But with wry amusement I note the fact that when a pint now costs typically over a fiver, reducing the cost by 1p is a bit like pissing in the Atlantic and expecting it to make a difference, lol. And will in any case be entirely undone by the big increase in the minimum wage and in employers' NI contributions insofar as running costs are concerned. So that is effectively little more than a headline grabbing gimmick. If anyone actually notices the pint in their local being a penny cheaper than yesterday, please do give us the good news. I will be surprised if it happens anywhere.

...As for wastage, that often results from people at the top of the food chain conjuring up ideas that are shite in practice on the shop floor...

...I just never understand why management anywhere doesn't get this but if you want to know how to reduce wastage on the shopfloor, consult the staff working on it. Because we see where the wastage is happening all day long.

No one would last long at the DWP if they spent all day doing bugger all as you assume one in three are doing. For one thing most are employed on temporary contracts via agencies so are not directly employed by the DWP at all initially. The ones that doss or mess about or who are just hopelessly crap do not get their contracts renewed. The ones that work hard and who are good at the job get properly taken on. Which itself weeds out most of the likely dossers.

Furthermore, all DWP staff have frequent performance reviews, and underperformers cracked down upon. Eventually if they do not come up to scratch they are got rid of, but most do because the ones who wouldn't have mostly been weeded out before even being properly taken on.

Yes not all staff are up to the excellent quality of my friend, primarily because pay has declined in real terms to such an extent that it has become harder to recruit top quality. They have to make the best of the material they can get applying for the jobs. You get what you pay for in the end. But the hardworking ones rise in the ranks whilst those performing too poorly are generally let go of.

You probably assume the unions make this impossible, but this is a myth. Unions only have effective power to challenge dismissals or disciplinary processes where these are illegal or unreasonable. My friend isn't even in the union, since she chooses not to be.