State ownership of companies

[El Cid]

Mixtures are a mess.

 

Once again. The banks were only a problem because the government decided to rescue them.

 

In my area of work, there are both good and bad private companies, at the moment the council want to save money, so they can accept private companies that have lower standards, yet council school buses cost a fortune, but give a better service.

[unbeliever]

In my area of work, there are both good and bad private companies, at the moment the council want to save money, so they can accept private companies that have lower standards, yet council school buses cost a fortune, but give a better service.

 

If the council sets a minimum standard, then allows private companies to bid. Then they sack the ones which fail to meet the standard, and freely replace them if they get a better offer; it'll all work out.

 

In my area of work, it's all public sector. The waste is vast. The tax-payers and the students are getting a very poor deal.

Edited August 10, 2015 by unbeliever

[Cyclone]

The private market will often have a range of companies that provide differing levels of service, you pay for what you get. Look at Uber (for a topical example), standard, elite and premium cars available, pay more, get better service.

If you are subcontracting and want a minimum level, then put that in the contract and enforce it.

[Anna B]

If the council sets a minimum standard, then allows private companies to bid. Then they sack the ones which fail to meet the standard, and freely replace them if they get a better offer; it'll all work out.

 

In my area of work, it's all public sector. The waste is vast. The tax-payers and the students are getting a very poor deal.

 

Public or private sector, can't something be done to eliminate the waste and improve the service?

 

I would have thought that would be a priority in any business. I don't see why the aim to spend wisely and give the taxpayer a good deal shouldn't be exclusive to the private sector.

 

Can you enlighten me?

[unbeliever]

[/b]

Public or private sector, can't something be done to eliminate the waste and improve the service?

 

I would have thought that would be a priority in any business. I don't see why the aim to spend wisely and give the taxpayer a good deal shouldn't be exclusive to the private sector.

 

Can you enlighten me?

 

I do try in as much as I can from my position, which is not very senior.

But without any meaningful pressure, which would normally arise from competition, administrators get into this self-serving mindset and everything bloats.

 

One of the problems in my experience is that peoples' time is not valued. When everybody is on fixed pay and conditions and people are very hard to replace or discipline, productivity is removed from the equation.

There are any number of people running around generating activity and not producing anything. It's not only their own activity is a waste, by that activity they slow everybody else down.

 

For example we have procurement.

If you want to order something, even for £10. You first do what everybody else does and find it listed for £10 on amazon with next day delivery available for maybe £3.

You can't order it though, because there's the matter of contracted and approved suppliers. You have to first make every effort to establish whether one of the "contracted suppliers" can supply it. These are contractors with whom a deal has been made that a small discount ~10% or less on their list prices has been agreed in return for exclusivity.

The contracted suppliers don't appear to have it once you've trawled through their catalogues, so you can go to the "approved suppliers". Maybe they have something similar, if so it's probably £20 (-£2 "discount") with delivery in a few days, not quite right but maybe it'll do.

So you've gone through this process, which has taken you at least an hour and cost your employer about £100 by now.

You put together an order and then track down an approved person to sign the order and tell you which of the hundreds of charge codes should be applied to it.

Sorted. You'd think. You take it to the accounts secretary. It sits on the accounts secretary's desk for about a week and then you get an e-mail summoning you to the office of the accounts secretary to explain why you're ordering from an "approved supplier" and not a "contracted supplier". You explain that none of the contracted suppliers had it listed in their catalogues. The accounts secretary is not happy and sends you away to e-mail each of the "contracted" suppliers and ask them whether they can supply the item. Some of these suppliers reply and others don't. 2 weeks go by and your order is still sitting on a desk.

Eventually the accounts secretary concedes that you've made reasonable efforts with the "contracted" suppliers and puts the order through. The order then goes to the accounts secretary's boss for approval. The boss is away on a management training course and then has a backlog to deal with on their return, so your order gets approved about 10 days later.

In the mean time, the "approved" supplier has run out of stock so now the order sits on their desk and they wait 3 weeks for the item to come in.

By this time, you've lost the will to live, but you contact the accounts secretary and ask what happened to your order. A few days later the accounts secretary tells you that the item has been discontinued.

You then start again.

This time you find a company which has the item you originally wanted (still more expensive than amazon ~£15 but still), but they're not on the approved suppliers list. You talk to the accounts secretary who gives you a form to fill in to request that the supplier is added to the suppliers' database. You do as you're told and a couple of weeks later you're told that this has been done.

You generate a new order and get it approved, then put it in and wait for it to be approved again, and about 2 weeks later, the item finally arrived.

By this time, the project you wanted the item for has been cancelled for failing to stay on schedule. I wonder why.

 

Total man hours spent: ~20. Total delay: ~2 months. Total saving: -£3 (i.e. a loss of £3) and 1 failed project.

Edited August 10, 2015 by unbeliever

[L00b]

Public or private sector, can't something be done to eliminate the waste and improve the service?

Elimination of 'waste' in the private sector is, as long explained this thread already, essentially a Darwinian process. From the corporate level within the marketplace all the way down to the individual job level within the private organisation.

I would have thought that would be a priority in any business. I don't see why the aim to spend wisely and give the taxpayer a good deal shouldn't be exclusive to the private sector.

The above Darwinian process is, by and large, inexistent in the public sector.

 

Going by my neighbour's tales (a senior NHS manager in data) over the years, I've lost count of how many inept NHS employees have just been "moved-by-promotion" (to make the problem go away, rather than solving it) rather than sacked. Not that I ever begrudged him his 6 months leave on full pay for 'stress'

 

This issue pervades most public service organisations, all the way to the top.

 

Anything goes good, no end of self-congratulating credit takers lining up.

 

Anything goes south, always someone's else fault, buck stops or sticks nowhere, nobody responsible, never mind accountable.

 

The last one in which I was directly involved, hands-on, cost the NHS a settlement of £25k. That was the NHS trying to play at being a private sector business, messing up big time, and then trying to pass the buck to my (private SME) client. Unsurprisingly, no sanctions, no heads have rolled.

 

You want to sort public sector waste? Start by making public sector employees personally accountable (top to bottom, of course) to the same extent they would be in most private sector organisations. That may help to remind them that they're supposed to be careful with money (i) that's not theirs and (ii) that they've not had to earn.

Edited August 10, 2015 by L00b

[max]

 

Once again. The banks were only a problem because the government decided to rescue them.

 

At the time of the banking crisis I was working at one of the major banks in the mortgage sector. We had compiled a file of several million letters which would have gone out to mortgage holders should the bail out not occur. What these letters stated was that the mortgagee had 28 days in which to repay their mortgages otherwise the bank would foreclose.

 

If the government had not saved the taxpayers from this catastrophe then the fall out from the banking crisis would have been unimaginable.

[unbeliever]

At the time of the banking crisis I was working at one of the major banks in the mortgage sector. We had compiled a file of several million letters which would have gone out to mortgage holders should the bail out not occur. What these letters stated was that the mortgagee had 28 days in which to repay their mortgages otherwise the bank would foreclose.

 

If the government had not saved the taxpayers from this catastrophe then the fall out from the banking crisis would have been unimaginable.

 

They never would have got away with that.

And the government didn't save the tax-payers. The tax-payers saved the banks.

[max]

They never would have got away with that.

 

Unfortunately, the mortgagees had agreed to the terms and conditions when they took out their mortgages. There was no sense that anyone would have "got away" with anything. The banks had a legal obligation to protect their investors and the only way to do that was to recover the money they had lent to others.

[L00b]

At the time of the banking crisis I was working at one of the major banks in the mortgage sector. We had compiled a file of several million letters which would have gone out to mortgage holders should the bail out not occur. What these letters stated was that the mortgagee had 28 days in which to repay their mortgages otherwise the bank would foreclose.

Cue mass filings of Court actions with security for costs requests, hammering the final nails into the coffin of whatever liquidity levels remained in said banks at the time. Would have made the whole multi-£bn PPI thing look like chump change