The Tories' cunning plan: public sector turnover lottery

The conservatives have finally given into pressure and outlined their "plans" for public sector spending cuts - and sure enough, those plans are pretty much non existent. Basically they intend to execute a massive recruitment freeze on the public sector, meaning that anyone who leaves their job isn't replaced, regardless of what that job is.

This means that their colleagues will have to attempt to fill in the gaps; it means that council services will be spread very thinly, resulting in a decrease in the quality of service; and public sector workers would be overworked and end up going off sick, meaning a further cut in quality and more work for the NHS in treating them.

Perhaps most worryingly, there's absolutely no strategy involved. The plan will inevitably result in public services being cut, but instead of taking the hard decisions around which services to cut, the Tories are leaving it all to chance. Essentially those areas with the highest turnover will be those which are cut, and that basically means cuts to the hardest services to deliver. The kind of services that are there to stop things like this from happening.