The full independent review of Barclays’ business practice by Anthony

Salz can be viewed at this link (Click Link).

All of us at Signal would like to wish all of you a very Happy Easter.

We will close at 1800 hrs on Thursday 28th March & reopen

at 0800 hrs on Tuesday 2nd April.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has today delivered his 4th budget.

You can read the full budget document here. (Link)

The final report into the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

public inquiry was published today, Wednesday 6th February 2013.

You can access the full report here: (Link)

I listened with interest to the slot on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on the new recruitment plans for the police service (Link).

The argument has obviously split around the matter of the need for fresh talent and the risk of having senior people in an operational organisation with no operational experience.

At first glance I tend to fall on the side of the doomsayers and for this I am aware that the charge of hypocrisy can be laid at my door. I am a former graduate of a ‘fast track’ scheme within an operational organisation. However, my path is slightly different to the direct entry being discussed for the police. I was already a serving member of the service with a number of year’s experience of the operational nature of the organisation before I entered the scheme. In this way I used the opportunity to accelerate my promotion and get the benefit of the career development opportunities available. However, during my time going through this process I met many candidates who were direct entry and saw first hand the risks associated with this recruitment strategy.

The other evening when there was nothing much I wanted to watch on TV I ended up trawling YouTube for old favourites. Originally intending to watch episodes of “Yes Minister”, don’t ask me how, I ended up watching an early 2000’s BBC documentary about Bang Kwang prison inThailand, popularly known as “The Bangkok Hilton”.

Here’s the link  if you want to watch, be warned, it’s pretty depressing viewing.

This Christmas brought a much needed break, coffee room chats with colleagues in the run up to the festive season have focussed on the theme of great tiredness, of the need to just have a break, frankly Christmas was almost incidental.

Several marathon sleeps later and it’s time to honour the traditions of reflection on the past year and focus on the challenges to come in 2013.

This year we have worked primarily in the Health sector. As predicted it has been a year of significant change, as the impact of the Health and Social Care Act becomes a reality, cuts, competition and the uncertainty of the full extent of the power that the new GP Commissioning Groups will wield in the health economy and how they will use it has seen  organisations move to ensure their focus on core business, efficiency, economy and value for money. This is borne out in system and structural change, and in many cases in TUPE transfer as the many and various organisations of the wider health economy unfreeze, change and refreeze, albeit as temporary as that re-frozen state may be.

I suppose if there is a lesson learnt this past year, it is that staff are getting to grips with the idea that change is a constant state. Whereas in the past the Public Sector has seen large scale “change programmes” with defined start and end dates and pre and post change states, the state of organisational change now seems almost perpetual. The main difference that staff are coming to terms with, that these changes more often than not have a  TUPE transfer as  a key feature of change. Public Sector as a lifelong workplace is no longer a certainty.

All of us at Signal would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy and healthy New Year.

Our times of business over the holiday period are listed below:

We close today, 21st December, at 1800 hrs and open again on Wednesday 2nd January 2013.

See you all in the New Year.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has today delivered the Autumn Statement for 2012.

You can read the full statement here. (Link)

 The Leveson inquiry report into the culture, practices and ethics of the press has been published

today. You can read the report here (Link).