by business editor Trevor Sturgess

Public sector workers have been urged to show Dunkirk spirit and copy the cost-saving discipline of business.

Business consultant Alyson Howard, former chairman of Kent Institute of Directors, said thousands of employees had taken pay cuts, unpaid leave, reduced hours and other measures to help save their own and others' jobs.

Owners had suffered too, often taking "pay holidays" for months.

There should be similar levels of initiative and sacrifice from public services.

Managers should not be more concerned about their own power but involve their teams in making the best use of their brain power.

They should make decisions as if they were a business.

It was time to be upbeat about the cost-cutting process rather than go into it with low expectations.

"We are better than that, and nowhere more so than in Kent. So let's have fewer of the "things have never been so hard and they are going to get worse remarks".

Things had been a lot worse and the recent Dunkirk 70th anniversary commemoration had reminded us of British pride, resilience and strength of character at a time when living standards were well below what they are today.

The "nanny" state had turned the British into a "lazy, passive and entitled" people, she claimed, poking and prying into everything we do yet "wasting huge sums on useless self-serving initiatives".

The cost-cutting process gave the country a chance to change things for the better, to genuinely cut down on waste.

Meanwhile, Dr John Philpott, chief economic adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, predicts that the Government's deficit reduction measures will stall any recovery in the UK jobs market and push unemployment close to three million, half a million higher than today.