The Company Running Britain

Serco, Capita, Sodexo, G4S, Morrisons ....... and on and on. There are so many workers i n the publc sector who have been transferred to each of these organisations in turn, as they have picked up contracts, milked them dry and moved on like a swarm of locusts.

Oh dear, here I am again, reading a thread and complaining about the government. It's simple I think. I don't have any objection to companies that set out to make a profit. Asda for example, I don't shop there, but have no problem with the fortune they make. I have no objection, and welcome, public services being accountable about their work, and the way our money is spent. I simply don't see that the nhs, probation, children's services, libraries, the prison service, etc can be profit making organisations. Some things are more important than the profit making ethos.

I really object to the way the CEO's of the public sector organisations cosy up to ministers and civil servants, and lean on middle managers to find a way to make their daft ideas work! In probation, we used to have a strong, assertive asociation of chief officers. With the introduction of managerialism and the notion of runnng public sectors as fund-attracting buinesses, it was divided and disbanded, coinciding with the personal relationship between the head of probation and a minister (they both moved sideways and up), and after that the money tail was wagging the dog.

Working to a budget is not a diffcult concept. Sellng yourself and the service users down the river in order to fit the ideals of capitalist businesses doesn't work - it's not difficult to see why - they cream off the money that could be used to help the poor and vulnerable. Instead of holding managers and employees to account about how they use tax-payers' money, auditing and checking spending, and CEOs fighting their respective organisation's corner, it was more tempting to side with the ministers and receive performance-related bonuses.

In my very limited experience of public sector contracting out services, I felt that the balance was heavily weighted against small organisations, charities etc that were doing the kind of work on offer, often very effectively, but couldn't take on the kind of convoluted monitoring packages required to win the contract. They would have needed to take on extra staff whose sole work would have been dealing with the data-deluge. The application and bidding processes were also unnecessarily complex. So only bigger organisations already employing lots of admin staff were in a position to bid. And win contracts for work they had never done. And drive out the small operators. And underpay and overwork their front line employees.

Spot on, Lilygran. I was asked to help a small charity tender their bid to continue the work they had been doing for many years, assisting newly-released female prisoners. This was initiated because of a government report on female prisoners. They were leaned on, had obstacles thrown in their way, and a large organisation's solicitor obtained their bid and picked it to shreds, making their small team work into the wee hours to try and finalise the bid. They lost and the new contractors failed at the first hurdle, by which time the charity had folded and could not take the work back.

It is like the new Green Deal. The scheme only takes on contractors that can offer the full gamut of insulation services from boiler replacement work, in the past often done by small local heating and plumbing firms to loft insulation, again often a service offered by small local specialist tradesmen and more specialist services, using specialist contractors.

The result? only large national companies and energy companies could tender for the work. Nationally run companies run up large overheads managing national programmes and. with only afew approved companies costs rocket.

The Ambulance services are another example where private contractors are taking over, they don't train their staff to the same level as NHS Ambulance services and get away with it , they often have only a driver who has no training and a semi-trained attendant, they first took most of the non-urgent work and then Ambulance services found it was cheaper to bring in private ambulances for busy periods than to fully train and staff their own ambulances... so the quality of Ambulance staff is going down hill fast it won't surprise me in the least if NHS ambulance staff disappear completely before long and thats a dangerous slippery slope if you ask me.

I think that lots of services etc have been totally ruined by being outsourced to private companies. Trouble is it is very difficult to redress the situation without spending lots of money from the public purse.
I did not know that about Ambulance staff - that is a disaster/another scandal waiting to happen.

What I do not understand is the idea that everything is run more efficiently by the private sector, think of the banks, G4 security who were unable to cope with the Olympics, so they called the army in, supermarkets, especially Tesco, and horsemeat, the list is endless as private sector companies make mistake after mistake after mistake. They are no better at running things than state organisations.

The problem is we know who funds the Conservatives...............

Coast guard services, inland waterways, court interpreters, private prisons, employment programmes, IT systems , private health care....... Still the contracts are awarded to companies who have manifestly failed to deliver? Why? Hm......follow the money.
Denmark was not the only state with something rotten in it.