Editorial comment on the news

Stop the Merry‐Go‐Round; I Want to Get Off By now readers of this journal will be familiar with the notion that when the Government has controversial proposals to put forward in the employment field it releases them about half an hour before Parliament goes into recess. It's a clever move despite the fact that it is getting a bit predictable and monotonous. And it has happened once more: this tactic reached a new high in the few days before the Summer Recess with such goodies as The Open Tech Task Group Report, the Job‐Splitting Scheme, the Community Work Scheme, together with more snippets of useful information about the mammoth Youth Training Scheme. In our business an avalanche of paper of such dimensions is usually referred to as an ‘information overload’; to the layman it will usually be described as creating ‘mental indigestion’. Either way it is beginning to create a new problem to employers, even to specialists in the field of employment and state intervention in it. The situation is being made too complex for it to be handled efficiently by those people who are called upon to make the necessary company decisions to implement all the obligations being placed upon industry and business. These are already‐busy people under pressure from all manner of features of an economy under severe strain.