Senate The UK Politics discussion

Yeah, Capita's entire business model is 'rip off the public/charity sector'. Bunch of disgusting lizards.

Re. rough sleeping fines: terrible but a local council decision. Clarke's a reasonable guy; a letter to him would probably bring pressure on the council to stop this cruel idiocy.

This was a large part of the problem for us. Not so much changing the spec (although I believe that happened too) but that the spec was not fit for purpose. People with actual technical knowledge are not involved in specification or procurement. I haven't seen the spec we gave Capita but - given that our business plan contains exactly zero measurable targets and bucketloads of tautology (e.g. 'Client service will be improved by improving services to clients') and meaningless gibberish (e.g. 'We will embed One Service (undefined) into the Transformation Pipeline (also undefined)') - I suspect that it was, at best, a wafty pile of **** that had Capita rubbing their grubby hands with glee. Tens of millions of pounds for a bad hack of MS Dynamics that barely functioned and couldn't be updated.

It was a far smaller project (only a 6 figure spend with 5 figure annual ongoing cost) but we commissioned Civica to build a data warehouse. The whole process was overseen by our (hopeless) operations team and the product we got was almost completely useless. Since then, I've built my own data warehouse that actually meets our requirements at a cost of a few hundred quid a year for AWS hosting and a SQL server licence. We're still paying them a 5 figure sum for something no-one uses because we're tied into a contract while the DW that actually works only cost a few hundred quid and a couple of weeks of my time. Put muppets in charge when dealing with wolves and that's what you get. Public money flushed down the toilet.

 

So, it turns out Parliament is indeed sovereign:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/mps-could-block-brexit-deal-no-10-admits-a7368561.html

Of course, this is after invoking Article 50, which is supposed to be irreversible but it seems the legalities may not be quite so clear cut.

Equally, there is precedent for a country rejecting a policy or proposal then voting again, at a later date, which sees it be accepted. It hasn't been done on the scale of an In/Out vote, but there's nothing to stop that earlier precedent being widened or raised to apply to such.

 

When I worked in a local council office there was a large conference room overflowing with cabinets full of records that were supposed to be digitised and assimilated into this superb new and expensive primitive cloud-based abandonware system that had arrived years late in an unusable state, and at the cost of the jobs of the people who had previously processed the information (some of it quite sensitive, children's services and benefit fraud investigations for example). They had me move in to scan, shred, and digitise it all, actually working with the people who needed it to create working databases to assimilate it into the perfectly safe and fit for purpose system that we already ****ing had. Start to finish it took me 6 months at about a pint over minimum wage (I was happy for the work at the time), and they could have employed another hundred spods like me and still saved money just on that single consequence of the Capita scam that I, a Private Eye reading lowly graduate office monkey, was aware of.

(I also came across a number of other non-PFI scams and dodgy practices that I think I've mentioned here before, but I digress).

An anonymous (for reasons that will become obvious) comrade of mine worked at a comprehensive school that really suffered from public sector vultures. It got conned into some ridiculous contracts for teaching resources, IT and caretaking/upkeep, while also getting worked into becoming a local leisure centre in exchange for having 'better' facilities built (actually dangerously substandard and inferior to what they replaced, thanks Building Schools For The Future!). They were taken in by every public sector con going - they paid a grand a month to rent and maintain a single photocopier in a permanently broken state, they paid three times the market rate for A4 paper, they were paying hundreds for someone to drive out in their van to change a light bulb (and thousands for the privilege of being able to call them), they were paying third parties to pay the wages of people who they had previously employed directly, they paid tens of thousands to replace old computers that had exactly the same spec as the old, they paid a graphic designer thousands to make them a permanently low resolution logo and motto that made no logical or grammatical sense, they paid scrap merchants to take away their old copper wiring and heating systems instead of charging them for the scrap value of the metals (I don't think there was even any kickback on that one), they paid crafty signwriters who made all their new corridor and office door signs 10 times larger than ordered (admittedly that one was lol)... You name it, they fell for it.

So they absorbed the inflated costs of running the school and hosting the leisure centre/community centre/touring evangelical church(!) while seeing no profits at all from the commercial ventures thrust upon them (yay for PFI), and oddly enough they completely ran out of money! Many false redundancies, bitter lawsuits, stress related absences and massive drops in GCSE grades later, the Tory privatisation demons descended on it and made it a burnt offering to an unscrupulous and fraudulent academy trust run by a complete **** of a lawyer whose name may or may not partially half rhyme with Peon Cumfart. At this point the A-C grades had been languishing just below 40%.

The admittedly incompetent heads were sacked. Cumfart would turn up to motivate his new senior staff (hand-picked for their incompetent Nazi prison guard qualities) to get as many of the old expensive staff to quit as possible, and to threaten the criminally overworked teachers (90 hours p/w), TAs (team of 15 including SEN and EFL specialists reduced to 4 generalists), janitors and cleaners (made to work overtime and not allowed to record the fact, plus a long list of grievances mostly centred around intimidation) with the sack, pay cuts, etc. He's said to have promised that he'd relish lawsuits because he "never loses" unfair dismissal cases. My comrade quit, their vacant DH position was then filled by an actual zygote with an Oxbridge degree and no teaching qualifications or experience (hurrah for Teach First!). The school was back in special measures soon after, and has remained that way ever since. I hear, but am not asserting in any legal sense, that it now has 1/6th of the pupil numbers it used to, with an A-C rate of ~4% (no typo) though you might not read those numbers in the official statistics. In terms of league tables, it now ranks lower than children's hospices, figuratively speaking (it ranks below hospital schools anyway). Cumfart pays himself a lot of money to destroy public education services and wreck the prospects of disadvantaged children, at least according to OFSTED (though they may not have used those exact words). A proper carrion eating flying reptile, in my opinion (which I hopefully can't be sued for).

tl;dr: Yes.

 

None of that surprises me. Well, ok, the A-C rate at the school did but other than that.

It seems to be ubiquitous - naive and incompetent public sector management commissioning consultancy firms who rip them off because they can get away with it.

I think our disagreement comes when I blame incompetent management and you blame the consultancy firms (although I still think they're reptiles - particularly Capita who devote themselves solely to the purpose of preying on the public/third sectors - so we're not entirely in disagreement there).

I do think that typical Tory thinking is awry. The public sector is incompetent, the private sector is less so, therefore privatise... this just doesn't work. Companies want to make profit and want their margins as thick as possible which isn't compatible with public service. The funding is the same whether you do a great job or an absolutely terrible job.

I think, instead, the solution is to encourage meritocracy in the public and third sectors. Every year I see a few bright sparks join the organisation I work for and leave within a year because of the awful, turgid environment in which they can't achieve anything. Meanwhile, those who thrive on achieving bugger all stay on; those who enjoy pontificating in meetings get promoted to management and those who are power-hungry sociopaths not bright enough to make it in the private sector make it to exec management. This seems like a common theme across the sector. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of bright, motivated people wanting to get involved, it's just that they have the life crushed out of them and go elsewhere.

Meanwhile the private sector benefits from a bunch of bright people who aren't motivated by money or power and are either indifferent when it comes to who they work for or - in some cases - would actually be more comfortable working for a cause that's about more than making money. Companies achieve this purely by creating an environment that's vaguely meritocratic (excluding the upper echelons where the rules are always different) and conducive to actually getting stuff done.

There are plenty of third sector - and a tiny handful of public sector - organisations who create the same kind of environment and manage to perform well; attracting and retaining competent, motivated people and allowing them to get **** done. This is what I'd like to see across the board. Sadly, I don't think it's realistic because decision making roles are generally grabbed by the very worst elements of humanity.

You're all ****ed off at the corporate wolves and vultures who prey on the idiots who run the public sector. So am I, but I'm more ****ed off at the culture that not only allows but encourages idiots to run the public sector and fights to retain and protect that status quo.

 

I blame successive governments going back to the 70s for ****ing the public sector. I don't blame public sector careerists for failing when they suddenly have a corporate role thrust upon them... Head Teachers, GPs, clerks, etc should not be concerned with sourcing funding and contract negotiations for services, that sort of thing should be dealt with by specialists in the local authority (or even national government). Imagine if each GP surgery or hospital had to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry over the cost of every prescription. Well now more and more schools have to secure their own books, paper, computers, etc, and are often only allowed to choose between approved vendors, all of whom charge more than the standard market rate.

If by being more meritocratic you mean performance based pay, no way. It does not work in the public sector, especially considering the effects of the work done are often not instant, and concern more than easily measurable economics. There's a social and cultural value that the reptilian tory brain doesn't comprehend, and with a lot of dry, repetitive administrative stuff, quality of output is often a lot more important than quantity. When there's a push to get more forms processed, people suffer. E.g. the Children's Services dramas of recent years where we see at-risk registered children being rehoused with convicted rapists.

 

Well the problem is you're stuck with an inherently flawed model anyway, and you can't incentivise pay with things like Bonus' because of inherent commitments to fairness. Given public servants can't really be sacked for non-performance, you end up with a lot of dead weight in the public service that the private sector would be less tolerant of.

If you want a good public service, then public servants who objectively do **** all should be eligible for a good, robust sacking.

And before you come back at me with some sort of socialist claptrap, V2, please note I spent a number of years working for the public service so I have experienced it first hand. We had at least 2 people like this in the Division (of 30) who were easily taking £70,000 of taxpayer funded salaries plus generous superannuation to do nothing all day but hadn't broken the law so couldn't be sacked.

The reason you end up with a public service that looks like it needs incentives or consultants brought in is there's no good mechanisms for getting rid of bad public servants.

This is a good article on the issue in Australia:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/nat...ns-and-selection-criteria-20140330-35rh9.html

"Nonetheless, gilding the lily while on a job hunt appears to be no great crime. I am aware of one SES officer whose resume stated she held a master's degree; when it was revealed she didn't, she was given time off to finish her studies."

Note: - "SES" = Senior Executive Service, aka upper management: http://www.apsc.gov.au/managing-in-the-aps/ses

You cannot have a climate like this and expect results. And by results I don't mean cost savings or financial performance; I mean the role of the public service is to "operationalise", to borrow ugly management speak from the Yanks, the policy agenda of the government of the day (irrespective of which government that is). If they cannot implement policy in practical terms due to either unqualified staff gaming a selection process that's rigid in order to appear merit based, or because of large chunks of paid employees impersonating paperweights, then governments naturally will get frustrated and look for answers.

Your view, V2, is not surprising but I submit it's too kind on public servants which, although many are exceptional and dedicated and ethical (and I worked with a number of really smart, talented, driven people), are easily able to underperform with impunity.

 

I think there's at least as much incompetence in the private sector proportionally speaking, more nepotism, and certainly more corruption, from creative tax returns to global economy wrecking fraud. Public sector clock-watching doesn't cost society all that much, and excluding the top tiers of senior civil servants, nobody really gets rich working within the public sector. The magnitude and effects of incompetence gets worse the further up the pay scale in both worlds, I just think the private sector gets to do a wider variety of damage at a far greater cost. I'm sure we've all worked with numpties in private business, everyday we all encounter private sector workers whose minds are permanently elsewhere.

Call me paranoid but I suspect academy chains aren't failing schools out of mere incompetence, just as Crapita and their cohort of evil doers aren't building useless systems from incompetence, I think it's a politically motivated strategy to force ruin on certain targeted institutions, and a long term asset stripping project.

 

Yes but that's not what I'm saying. You're really good at dodging points you don't like to reinforce ones you do.

The capacity for clock-watchers to disrupt or retard the implementation of policy into practice is what creates a need (perceived or real) for consultants, for outsourcing, etc etc. If the public service was better at its job, then you wouldn't need this. And often, if you pay in peanuts, you get monkeys.

 

I don't mean performance-related pay. I mean creating an environment in which people can get **** done and where success is celebrated.

It's not just a case of clock watching, it's a case of systemic celebration of incompetence, waste and stupidity along with hostility towards competence and achievement.

I know almost nothing about academy schools, so I'm not able to comment. In the case of Capita, their business model exists because the public and third sectors are riddled with incompetence and lack of purpose.

 

I think those contracts are awarded with failure as a priority, to force ruin, strip assets and de-legitimise the public sector itself. It comes from, and reinforces the mindset that claims private business can do government work more efficiently based on economics and ignoring the social/cultural costs of outsourcing/privatising.

If you're truly concerned with systemic (sigh) celebration of incompetence itself, rather than attacking institutions deemed too socialist, you'd aim your sights at the incompetence that does the most social harm. A few wasted millions/billions on a few council jobsworths and over-promoted idiots in senior roles is nothing compared to the harm inflicted by the financial sector. A section of the high profile jobs market is dedicated to professional incompetents whose function is to accept large amounts of money in return for receiving blame for corrupt practices. These guys resign and get hired by an even nastier company, and they make millions of pounds, receive knighthoods and accolades, etc, etc.

Success in public works is often hard to measure.

 

I'm not defending the financial sector and I don't really know enough about it to comment. I only get to deal with the **** end of the sector that preys on vulnerable people. It's given me some satisfaction to have helped shut down a lot of companies operating in that space.

Perhaps the financial sector does greater harm - I really don't know enough to have an opinion - but it's hardly a defence. That's like defending a murderer on the grounds that they only killed one person so Fred West is worse.

It's not so much the salaries drawn by over-promoted idiots but the amount of public money they misspend. Over half of the funding my organisation receives is wasted. It also - and I would have thought this would irk you - goes into the pockets of Capita, Civica, PWC and their like. This is normal in the public sector. I know this because I deal with public sector organisations all the time - Ofgem, the ONS, TSA and a bunch of others - and I find exactly the same culture throwing huge amounts of public money down the toilet. A few million here, a few million there... it all adds up. Money wasted on Capita alone tops the £2 billion mark. Yeah, maybe less than Trident or a bank bailout or whatever but £2billion+ a year could do a hell of a lot of good.

Some attempt at measurement might be a good thing. My performance isn't measured in any way, nor is that of my team, my department or my organisation. Over 90% of our funding comes from the public purse and that - to me - seems a little ****ed up. Some accountability might be in order. Like someone maybe questioning why we spent tens of millions on a computer system that we abandoned within months because it was not fit for purpose and couldn't be fixed because it was so poorly built in the first place instead of just throwing millions more at us so that we can flush that down the toilet of another consultancy firm.

edit:- just another thought.

If I entrust my money to someone to provide a service and they pay the bulk of it to a snake oil salesman and the service isn't provided as a result, whom do I blame? And should I then entrust more money to the idiot who threw it away on snake oil? Without holding them to account in any way?

It's also not about political ideology for me. This kind of waste - although prevalent in the Blair/Brown years - dramatically increased over the course of the last government.

 

But they are rolling back the state! By giving large chunks to the private sector without any public line of accountability.

The other element of all this is the procurement rules the public sector has to abide by. Now those exist to prevent back-handers being given by companies to secure contracts, but they also, due to their requirements, tip the deck towards the unholy trio of Serco, Crapita and G4S who have the resources to apply in the required manner, which smaller, but possibly better, companies lack. Who sets the laws in this respect? Same as everything else - ultimately Parliament.

You can work out what the aims of the rules are - and they are indeed generally good, the problem is somewhere inbetween thinking them up and setting up the system, a host of unintended effects came about. (Though, if we're being fair it's probably impossible to design a system that someone, somewhere won't find a way to exploit.)

 

Yes and like any good piece of conspiracy thinking it's usually forged deep underground; far, far away from any contact with the process it seeks to capture.

Having outsourced functions myself when I was at Immigration I can tell you that the requirements are prescribed in the policy framework that sets up a tender request. The requirement first and foremost is to demonstrate that the function is essential and cannot be performed in-house; then, at least in Australia (though we're based off your system, so I assume it's similar there based on what I can see) that it represents best value for money for the Commonwealth. Meaning, it seeks to avoid the kind of nepotism that means your brother's IT company, run out of garage, can't construct a database. Obviously there are other considerations that don't bear going into around national security that make sense, like "are they an arm of the Chinese government and if so why are they building the security service's network?"

I don't know what the consultancy wing of London looks like, but Canberra it's mostly IT. Some very specialised public servants retire from the APS and then consult back at twice the wages; but they're incentive based now so they tend to actually be worth it. Mostly though, the public service has trouble attracting and retaining people like BAs and DBAs required to build IT infrastructure; and since projects are dependent on funding, which varies, they're rarely kept on as permanent staff.

We had a consultant on a 3 year project, probably paid AU$200,000 a year, to build an entire border management framework and database for a key regional ally. Did anyone in my area have that expertise? No. Did we need him after 3 years? No.

But, of course, there are useless consultants too, but so long as they satisfy the prescribed policy conditions they can be hired. The issue is largely that organisations that aren't able to do the work in house for whatever reason outsource it and are paying with money that isn't reliably forecast year to year and isn't earned by the Department or Ministry. Every year, we'd approve spending on projects or visits or trips or whatever at the end of Q3 so that we spent every single $ we earned, for if we didn't it didn't come back the next year.

It's easy to hold the public service up as some noble, perennially under assault beast that's trying to serve the public interest. But until you've worked in the public service so you cannot truly appreciate how complicated and frustrating and amazing it can be. You certainly cannot do more than wave your willy around in idle speculation about outsourcing and contracting.

 

Whoah now. Firstly, 2008.

Secondly, that murder simile doesn't work on a number of levels, but if it did, then what I'm saying is that I'd want our limited police resources focussed on catching the prolific serial killer with greater priority than catching the odd single-killing killer. I'm not defending or pardoning the single-killers (there is probably a term for a non serial killer but wth) on the basis that their crimes could be worse (though there are in fact sentencing rules/guidelines for judges that rank and categories different severities of crime, so in a way I am saying that too, kind of. Look it's a dodgy metaphor, okay).

I acknowledge that there is waste, inefficiency and incompetency in the public sector, I just think we should go after those who cause the most harm as a priority. Set our self righteous rage sights a little higher than sideways promoted anonymous nobodies mis-counting paperclips for a living.

True.

It strikes me that measuring performance/attainment is probably a good thing where appropriate, but the law of unintended consequences applies even then. Many public services produce social/cultural benefits - qualitative results that are by their nature hard to objectively quantify, and perhaps even distasteful/immoral to express in terms of monetary value anyway. I'm sure it's possible to calculate how much it costs the state to neglect vulnerable people compared to supporting them, but that's not how I would like people's futures decided. Thinking of efficiencies and performance targets in purely monetary forms neglects other kinds of value.

Most offices can at least keep track of their environmental impact rather easily and the public sector has been ahead of the private sector curve in that respect, I think.

There have been questions in parliament and some official business regarding many Crapita/G4/etc fiascos. The buck stops there, as Jedi Ben points out. On smaller scales the buck stops at the elected councillor level. The corrupt firms themselves should face fines and criminal charges where appropriate, too.

These schemes are cooked up and implemented because the cult of (C/c)onservatism wishes to cripple and de-legitimise the public sector, because The Market shall provide, all hail The Market.

The trustee and the snakeoil salesman, no, and no.

Blair and Brown were both had a Con-like passion for their PFI babies. Blair I can understand, but Brown sticking with it somewhat baffles me because it had been long exposed by the time he took office. I guess it was a face saving thing because he was chancellor, but he could have easily passed it off as a Blair commandment and discredited it. Given its proven track record for tearing holes in public expenses it makes perfect sense for the tories to go nuts for it because they want public services to fail, and they want to cook the books by any means necessary.

 

Whoah. You worked for Australian immigration? Right to lecture me rescinded until further notice.

Yeah, we're all conflating different issues together and taking shots at each other for neglecting one when addressing the other. It's tiresome.

I have been employed in the public sector before (three times, three very different roles, admittedly all quite lowly), I know people inside Crapita and G4S, my parents both worked in the public sector in very different roles (a royal commission, and education), my partner works in the public sector, some of my very best friends work in the public sector/former public sector/****ed up PFI bastardisation of the public sector, I even have some extended family and family friends at Vauxhall Cross (who you'd just cream over, but I think are a bunch of ****s by and large), and I subscribe to Private Eye who endlessly bang on about this sort of thing every fortnight. I'd say I pass your insider test and you need to find a different approach, maybe even rethink your whole life.

 

Collecting welfare doesn't count as being employed by the public service, V2.

Yes, I worked in the international policy section before Labor cocked it up and the Tony Abbott government made it even worse. Every week we were hosting one immigration or border agency from all over the world on a fact finding mission. UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, US, Canada, China, you name it.

 

Do you think it might have been in the same way that police forces of the world go to cities in the US to see how not to deal with gang culture?

 

No.

You see, we worked extensively with the APAC region to detect and disrupt people smuggling routes in both source and transit countries. You can tell; the Bali Process, for example?

Between airlines and boat-based smuggling networks we stopped all non-lawful arrivals. And continued to send staff to assist in processing arrivals in refugee camps such as the Rohingya camps in Thailand.

This was back in 06/07/08 so before the Arab Spring, Syria et al. Bear that in mind please.

 

The raping, rioting, racist island prison camps, yes. Sleep well.

 

See sometimes I think you're not as ignorant as you make out, but then I realise that's a foolish notion.

 

The reality we're stuck with is a system built on failed ideologies.

Thatcher thought that the private sector would solve all problems because competence. Obviously, this hasn't worked because the private sector leverages competence to make profit, not to provide a good service (unless that results in greater profit). When she stopped building new council housing and started selling off council stock, there was an assumption that the private sector would take up the slack and start building to meet demand. Thing is, they make more profit (less turnover but far thicker margins) by not building. Thatcher thought that Capita and their like would bring private sector competence into the incompetent public sector. Obviously this hasn't worked either. A private company using a consultancy firm will have things like clear, measurable objectives, timeframes, budgets etc. The public sector doesn't. They're not clear or consistent about what they want to achieve yet they want to spend money. You end up with a situation like this:



Where consultancy firms exploit this total lack of clarity and almost religious belief in the bulletproof efficacy of absurd procurement processes.

The other ideology is all about tea breaks, tying oneself in knots, interminable meetings and endless, purposeless flapping around doing busywork. It's this ideology that produces business plans that have no actual targets (mustn't have accountability). It's this ideology that puts together inconsistent and incoherent briefs for consultancy firms that lead to open-ended channels of public money gushing into the pockets of lizards.

Both ideologies are ******.

As for the financial crisis, those culpable (i.e. the banks and rating firms responsible for all the packaging of sub prime loans in mixed bags and stamping them with the ironclad 'triple A' rating) should spend some quality time in prison. Those banks who failed to properly assess risk should also be held to account. Jobs should be lost, better controls should be put in place. My gut feeling is that those banks shouldn't have been bailed out in the first place, but I don't really know enough to understand whether that was really necessary.

What would be really good is if people could thinking in weird tribal terms. Socialism gave us some good stuff. Dangerous workplaces became less so, we got the NHS, we got the welfare state... all really good stuff. However, we also carry a lot of **** from that ideology that could do with a big and brutal sweeping brush. Thatcherism gave us some good stuff too. The country was a complete **** up whose economy was down the toilet when Thatcher took over. Some of what she did was horrific (poll tax, policing of the miners strikes etc) but, by and large, the Thatcher years turned us from a failed manufacturing economy to a successful innovation & finance-based economy in the space of a decade. Again, there's a lot of **** that's come from that ideology that also needs to be swept up with a big ****ing broom... we have a massive housing crisis as a direct result of Thatchers policies (continued by Blair/Brown), the NHS has become a cash cow for pharmaceutical companies (also helped along by Blair/Brown) and politics panders to the golden goose of the City while inflicting the horrors of benefit reform on the most vulnerable people in society.

The idea that either approach is somehow a balm for all our ills is absolute horse ****. Pointing out the faults of one is NOT defending the other. It is possible to both criticise the failed/damaging elements of both and to praise the successful/beneficial elements of both with a view to, y'know, maybe having something better at some point than either cut-throat Thatcherism or grim 1970s socialism. Neither ideology answers the problems we have.

 

Well now, we have a new gigantic political clusterfrell in flow: Heathrow expansion.

This one will run and run.

 

I can see why but I also think it's a bad move.


Heathrow is monstrously overrun and in many respects should be left alone and airports further afield should be expanded. If they insist upon being London centric then expand and improve on Gatwick.

Or how about a more novel approach and expand Birmingham or Manchester. Bring some of this wealth up North where we have little in comparison. The HS2 that they're on about is a waste and only really benefits the South as the tag line is about speeding up getting to London. Why not expand the Northern airports and let the money come here. It still benefits the UK overall and whilst I get there is further infrastructure in London, surely there is a strong argument for spreading the wealth around.

 

Hmm, oh yes.... South East to North: We drink your milkshake!