Our people are our greatest asset

You will have heard that slogan many times before ... and, quite often, just before an organisation downsizes or treats its employees poorly in some other way.

Now, the UK government is getting in on the act.

Oliver Letwin, the coalition's policy minister, recently revealed the government's determination to instil "fear" among those working in the public sector, who he claimed had failed for the past 20 years to improve their productivity. (Note: 'they' had failed; not those setting policy and strategy.)

Letwin, architect of the coalition's plans to reform public services, told a meeting at the offices of a leading consultancy firm that the public sector had atrophied over the past two decades.

In controversial comments angering teachers, nurses and doctors, he warned that it was only through "some real discipline and some fear" of job losses that excellence would be achieved in the public sector.

Letwin added that some of those running schools and hospitals would not survive the process and that it was an "inevitable and intended" consequence of government policy.

I am sure we now have high morale and high perfprmance amongst public sector workers.