The problem is that after a good two decades of Thatcherism, most companies are not actually running with a whole load of fat they can trim, and quite often the back office staff are already busy full time, regardless of whether the front end of the business is making money.

The expectation is, I suspect, that the remaining staff will pick up the extra workload and consider themselves lucky to have a job, which will work for the period where managers can use fear of unemployment as their main motivational tool, but in the long term, in will continue the process of ratcheting up the stress level of the typical British job.

Exactly the problem I've seen in several financial places. There is a little wriggle-room on some of the none technical back-office people possibly, but the 15% or 20% rate cuts have put a huge dent in the contractor pool (and, as expected, it's mostly the best ones who have walked), and the refusal to take on permanent staff is starting to bite.

Great, they've cut their staff costs by X%, but the delivery of services is down by 2X%, with IT managers now openly saying "there's nothing I can do, you got rid of the people I need".

We're all DOOMED I tell ya,........ DOOOOOOMED!

Every time someone like the Register reports on yet another "in da sh!t" story, then confidence will drop.

We have the same problem with the over-reporting of terrorist activity.

Every time someone publishes yet another report on terrorism, we lose another little bit of our freedom.

Not the press's fault but still,.....

DOOMED I TELL YA,.... DOOOOMED! :-)

It's cyclic. Bad news, low consumer confidence, less spending, less demand, fewer products, less need for resources, redundancies/businesses failing, Bad news...

How to break it ? Not a 2.11 % reduction in prices on high "value added" goods, that's just tinkering.

Should have been "Between 1 Dec08 and 31 Jan 09 VAT is 10%, rising to 12 % on 1 Feb 09 and 15% on 1 May 09 returning to 17.5% on 31 Dec 09". A temporary removal on the lower VAT rate on energy would be welcome as well (as well as looking at industry). OK, this does not help with purchases of zero rated goods (bread, milk, travel) but it'd alleviate some of the pain. Now that would be what I call a Kick Start. It would work better than throwing money at the banks who'll just do all they can to keep it.

These City jobs will come back when confidence is high and people think they can invest again...