Once again, Whitehall has undermined a major plank of the Government’s austerity programme

Although the Central Office of Information (COI) is to be abolished under plans unveiled by the Coalition last year, The Slog has learned that the overwhelming majority of those affected are to be redeployed in another part of the Civil Service, and nobody had been made forcibly redundant.

The COI has for years acted as a cross-Ministry overseer of the selection of advertising agencies and approval of advertising campaigns. For several decades it has been engaged in a turf-war with publicity mandarins within the Ministries themselves. Not only does this usually get in the way of developing Government campaigns, it also represents a ludicrous doubling up of those required to do the work. It is in turn a part of the so-called Government Communication Network (GCN), with whom it also duplicates (and complicates) much of the government publicity process.

When the Coalition came to power, the abolition of the COI was heralded as a ‘clean-break’ example of how the new Government would slash Civil Service costs. But the truth is that nobody has been fired, and there has been no constructive change.

Top bosses like Peter Buchanan have either left or retired with taxpayeer-funded payoffs, but I understand that in the region of 90% of all other COI staffers have been transferred….to the Government Procurement Service. This is the same job under a different, more general departmental nomenclature. Many of the ‘redeployed’ employees will simply carry on doing what they did before: getting in the way.

“It’s a classic case of moving the bodies around,” a top London advertising boss told me yesterday, “the effect on cost overheads will be negligible, and possibly nothing at all by the time all the moving about has been done.”

Yesterday, David Cameron said, somewhat ingenuously, that the EU’s economic problems were “slowing down the rate of cuts” in the UK. I’m not sure I really grasped what he was on about. But we can be fairly certain I think that the Prime Minister is redeploying the blame on this one: the real culprits here remain the devious upper echelons of the same not very civil service that awarded itself unvoted pension emolument increases after 2005.

As I was observing in last night’s piece, there is no way elected politicians will ever grasp this nettle: not even the Iron Lady managed it. Only by the application of extreme duress will this enormous army of leeches ever be reformed or, even better, removed.

A brief gossipy anecdote: four months ago Draper Osborne went personally to the (then Liam Fox-led) MoD in order to establish why the cuts that had been agreed were not, as such, happening. Having been shown several impressive schedules and spreadsheets about armed forces cuts, pay freezes and redundancy programmes, the former Bullingdon Man was a tad disturbed to discover that not a single occupant of the MoD itself was to become jobless. He is still struggling to effect this.