Capita: B is for Brexit, C is for cutting costs. Stock exchange: Yay! You guys are awesome Capita today did what Capita does best: confirmed yet another round of "cost competitiveness initiatives" to chop out even more people, cut real estate, and squeeze suppliers. Predictably, the stock exchange loved them for it. Calendar '18 was "year one" of CEO Jonathan Lewis's transformation programme to improve the fortunes …
why does it need to stop? This is proper capitalism - great big behemoths that deliver utter shite to their customers, are badly run and providing crap service go bust. They're operating at a loss (so the taxpayer is getting great value for money then, shareholders are footing this bill) and they will be replaced by somebody else who should be less crap, and if they're not, well, the cycle continues. I'm failing to see the issue here this is absolutely capitalism at it's finest - fit, well run, efficient companies survive, those who are crap at everything they do die a death and are replaced.
The absolute worst thing to do is the bring it back into pubic ownership where it'll be just as bad but with no one ever being held to account, and taxpayers money just entering an ever-widening drain.
Brenda McViking» This is proper capitalism - great big behemoths that deliver utter shite to their customers, are badly run and providing crap service go bust
You mean like Capita & IBM?
You miss Margaret Thatcher, don't you? She made Britain Great Again.
p.s. re: "bring it back into pubic ownership", it's already being run by a bunch of pricks, do you think this will make a difference?
Thatcher inherited a economy where shipbuilding, aircraft manufacture, the railways, the post office (the GPO was also BT), coal mining, every utility, etc, etc etc had all been bought by the government and was in public ownership. Pretty much all of these industries were also loss making, and the country was literally bankrupt and had to go with the begging bowl to the International Monetary Fund in 1976.
A combination of the unions striking, only having electricity for 3 days a week and the winter of discontent in 1979 led to Labour losing the election in 1979 rather badly and the British public putting Thatcher in with a mandate to sort out the mess. Her solution was devastatingly simple, privatise everything and let it all sink or swim.
It's quite fashionable among the kids today to pretend that the country was a Socialist paradise which was working perfectly, only to be single handedly destroyed by Thatcher. It is rather rare for anybody to suggest any alternative course of action that Thatcher could have taken that would have been viable other than "privatise it all and let the public choose who they want to use".
Personally, I think it's a travesty that civil servants are giving work to companies who they know are going to subcontract it ten times and end up with a crap job done. It appears obvious that the job should be given directly to a contractor who will be responsible for the job, and frankly I think pretty much everybody would support this sort of reform.
I would also quite happily support a state sponsored company competing in an open market on fair terms. If that company is inherently superior, then it'd end up picking up most of the market. The only justification for a public owned monopoly though is a tacit admission that the state has been, is, and will always be crap at running a company precisely because knowing that you will lose your job if you do a sufficiently shit job compared to the competition tends to focus minds.
Knowing that you have a job for life no matter how crap a job you do has proven to be a dead end in this country when tried previously and I personally have no great desire to try it again unless somebody can explain (and preferably demonstrate in the marketplace) what they are going to do differently to the utter failures delivered previously at extreme cost to the taxpayer.
If Margaret had been in charge, there would have been no referendum and Mogg et all would nursing bruises from the repeated handbaggings...
Well, she would still be dead now regardless...
But if a Thatcheresque attitude towards sticking up for UK Plc had been maintained by her successors then personally I think that the EU would look different today and we wouldn't have voted to leave.
Labour promised a referendum on the EU Constitutional treaty. This treaty was rejected by the voters of several different EU countries. It was then rebranded as the Lisbon treaty and signed into law without democratic consent despite being something like 99% identical to the EU Constitutional treaty.
Picking a single point; I rather doubt that Thatcher would have agreed to that being signed into law with the consent of the voters. She'd have fulfilled her promise and given us a vote. We'd have voted it down, and she'd have told them to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that could obtain the democratic consent of the people.
Had that have happened, then the widespread discontent reaching boiling point in almost every EU member state would have remained a small fringe movement instead of having reached boiling point and being about to take an absolute majority in the EU Parliament.
UKIP simply wouldn't have any significantly meaningful reason to exist and we wouldn't have had a vote to exit the EU because we wouldn't have needed one.
@Peter2It is very refreshing to hear those comments on comment boards seemingly increasing in guardian commenters.
Most people only believe what they have been taught because they've been taught to believe it. Most people also learn basic reasoning at some point, so if you point out the obvious logical fallacies in what they have been taught then most people will at least consider that they might have been taught nonsense.
It tends to work better than just screaming at somebody that they are wrong without pointing out why.
You have a slightly correct point stuff being bought back in house maybe equally as shit however it can equally be good and cheaper. They quote low to get a contract then stiff you year on year with higher prices.
"The director just needs a laptop replaced at short notice" crapita IT "We can do that but as you want us to break SLA they'll be a charge for that". We as inside IT "That's fine. Although its against SLA we can get it done quick, obviously no extra charge" and so on.
I've seen an NHS trust moan about internal IT despite us being fucking good and they got value for money. They outsourced after I left to Crapita. That trust has regretted it ever since.
"However, the local government market for large outsourced contracts is declining with a significant drop-off in the number and size of opportunities coming to market and existing clients choosing to end contracts early and take services back in-house," Capita said.
That is because your service, Crapita, sucks and is expensive, no, extortionate! The times are-a-changing,
... stop changing things.
If things do not change, at some point the processes / tools get pretty much optimised(*1).
At that point you (or the govt) can take many(*2) of these outsourced areas in-house - cutting out the cost of their profits and management
(*1) curse my spell check for suggesting a z.
(*2) there are limits - if you only need half a cleaner, you will carry on outsourcing.
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