David Cameron and George Osborne have been boasting how many new jobs their new economic recovery has created.

What they haven’t told you is that their Cabinet colleagues are actively working to strip Britain of existing jobs and replace them with new cheap skate jobs overseas, including some countries which have high risks of riots and terrorist attacks. And further the new jobs will mean the transfer of personal data on staff, possibly police and criminal records and the transfer of patient details from GP to GP to a foreign country.

I have written about this in Tribune magazine this weekend. But the two ministers are being very crafty – they are leaving it to a private company to sack the former civil servants and  transfer your records  and appointing a man who can hold both a Whitehall job and a private sector post at the same time to hand the companies the power to do it.

 

The man is Peter Swann – or Peter S as he likes to hide under his Linked In entry unless you know him well. His entry shows he is currently Director of Crown Oversight at the Cabinet Office under Francis Maude and his job description according to his own Linked In Entry is “transforming the delivery of Civil Service back office functions to over 500,000 staff across the UK and in all Government Departments.”

 His other simultaneous job is  executive director of Aon Risk Solutions which in his words is famous for ” relocating corporate Head Office functions and aligning this strategy to Aon’s captive offshore arrangement and existing outsourcing contractual arrangements.”

 To put it simply he is an outsourcing and off shore fanatic whose company has had a 43 per cent rise in dividends this year. Incidently  his firm provides a Terrorist Tracking Tool and up to date world guide on the dangers of strikes, riots and terrorist attacks in dodgy foreign countries. Download the map here.

So it should be no surprise that within a year a French firm, Steria, have now taken over all the back room jobs for the Department of Work and Pensions, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Environment Agency and is now looking at bidding for the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. Again the move is subtle, Whitehall has created a new UK company to do it, 75 per cent owned by the French. It came one year after the Department of Health ensured that Steria also took a majority holding in a NHS data  company providing the ” invisible information” through NHS Shared Business Services, including patient information to GPs and clinical recall services.

And now Steria is arranging that jobs currently in Newport, Cardiff, Sheffield and Leeds are destined to be replaced by ones abroad and staff in Newcastle, Blackpool,Peterborough and York are facing the sack. An analysis of Steria’s accounts – which they are required to disclose under EU law- reveals that they make the most money out of their British operations – but their biggest off shore operation is in India with lesser ones in Morocco and Poland. They also derive 39 per cent of their income from the public sector,

 So what will be Sheffield’s loss could well be Pune and Chennai in India’s gain. And here’s the irony  Peter Swann’s company, Aon, rates India as a high risk country for riots, commotion and terrorism, while Sheffield is low risk. It is also amazing that to save money our justice secretary, Chris Grayling, and Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, are quite happy for Steria to do what they like with our personal data. I bet they don’t take such risks with their own personal security. Perhaps both of them should be removed to exile in Pune.