UK government names suppliers on £3.5bn contact centre, shared services, and outsourcing framework The commercial wing of the UK government has named the winners on a £3.5bn framework to provide public-sector contact centres, including enterprise and infrastructure software to support them. Reading like a rogues' gallery of repeat offenders, the list features Capita, G4S, Serco, and Accenture, which take their place on a …
Similar to most large organisations these days, I assume a large proportion of that will be spent on bean counter centric strategies that (A) put costs before actual "public service", (B) prevent or dissuade people from actually being able to make contact in the first place, and (C) reduce the overall number of people employed, because, you know... less people always == better service right?
That must presumably be the same MPs who decided that this whole stupid outsourcing malarkey is a wonderful idea, have voted time after time in parliament to keep on doing this shit, and got the same expensively disastrous results every single time. Nothing like owning your own failures, is there?
That's how politics work these days. People are accustomed to cognitive dissonance. Politicians say about doing the right thing and blind people with virtue signalling, while actually doing quite the opposite.
It's not like you can do anything about it. Every politician does it, because why wouldn't they? Corruption is effectively decriminalised, nobody is going to check their accounts in tax havens or why their partners have millions without a job to show for it.
Unfortunately else.... You're right. There should be a law that prevents any company (inc senior board members) who donates to a political party or employs a sitting MP from winning Government contracts like these. MPs should be banned from taking roles in companies with these contracts for 5 years after leaving office (they are already well compensated if they lose their jobs once every 5 years). However, the turkeys won't vote for Christmas and too few of the voting public ever know about this or would care if they did.
I think every MP and their close family should be subjected to financial monitoring when they are in office and for at least 5 years after they leave. The conflicts of interest should be investigated by independent bodies as well. You can't have a situation like it is currently that Chancellor is implementing a law that directly benefits his wife's company and the party is satisfied there isn't any wrongdoing.
Sure this won't stop corporations lodging money in an Escrow and e.g. release them 10 years after requested Act or regulation has been enacted or contracts awarded. But it should at least weed out the impatient ones.
....after an unmitigated disaster, total fiasco and massive waste of public money with untold numbers of lives being harmed. And they say that " lessons will be learned"?
I'm starting to think, that maybe, just possibly maybe, perhaps, it could be that they don't actually learn any lessons ?
Eh?
"I'm starting to think, that maybe, just possibly maybe, perhaps, it could be that they don't actually learn any lessons ?"
Of course they do. But next time around, someone else is in charge, either due to election results or cabinet re-shuffles. They need to learn the lessons for themselves.
Well, the idea is that it's a corporate lesson,irrespective of who sits in the chair. In theory (huh) lessons learned are meant to be incorporated in the organisational culture. I'd suspect that beancounter culture and MBA culture both think it's their role to overwrite company culture when they arrive in the C suite- even when it's a good one. (Maybe especially when it's a good one).
The biggest issue with these big outsourcing deals is caused by TUPE ...
... if you move the same people around and only ever change a small layer of management ... what chance do you have to improve.
Failing services must be allowed to die and reborn with new staff, processes and cultures ...
Our society wants its cake and to eat it. Protect workers rights ... then complain about the performance of the very same workers.
Nonsense. There is not one single jot of evidence to suggest that these multitudinous outsourcing calamities have been anything to do with the frontline staffing, except in as much as that the outsourcing companies have attempted to undercut the in-house costs while also funding their own management and "shareholder value" by using fewer staff to do a bare bones version of the same tasks.
In no case that I've ever met or heard about ( and there's been a heck of a lot of both) has the quality of the work been a factor in the decision to outsource. It-has-always-been-about-cost-cutting.
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