If they strip G4S of all other contracts,who will pick up the slack?

Our governments (of whatever hue), have handed ever increasing numbers of contracts to ever reducing numbers of operators, leading to a situation similar to the banks, where they are too big to fail.

As with East Coast Rail, the Post Office is now making a profit ... so where is the need to privatise it, other than as an ideological imperative to ensure that profit is privatised and debt is socialised?

That's it – ideology.

Ah but you see the argument is as private companies they are then free to compete against the likes of DHL whereas state run companies can't. There is also the argument that companies like DHL are disadvantaged compared to state run enterprises.

That is the ideological argument in a nutshell.

Of course where it all falls down is no one wants to run a letter universal delivery service at prices we have today.

So the only way we will get to maintain such a service is if it is subsidised. So the tax payer will subsidise the newly privatised Post Office or we will eventually end up without such a service.

This kind of thing happens a lot. Look at the railways. Virgin get huge grants from government to run the West Coast line and the franchising farce shows the idea competitive tender for a franchise is bound to result ina cost effective (to the taxpayer) supplier of the service.

The ideological line here is private companies run things better than state companies but surely by now it's blindingly obvious after over 30 years of going down this route some things cost us all less if they are state run.

I don't think that this ideology is the case any more - it probably was the case when BR were privatised (although that has all been turned on its head now), but the real driving principal behind privatising public businesses now is more to do with the quick profit opportunity for a small handful of party benefactors.

JerryChicken wrote:I don't think that this ideology is the case any more - it probably was the case when BR were privatised (although that has all been turned on its head now), but the real driving principal behind privatising public businesses now is more to do with the quick profit opportunity for a small handful of party benefactors. You have a point. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... servatives "Perhaps you're wondering why the Tories talked so tough on banking reform before election but have done so little since. That may have something to do with the money the City gives to them. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in 2010 donations from financial services accounted for over half of all Tory funding."

JerryChicken wrote:I don't think that this ideology is the case any more - it probably was the case when BR were privatised (although that has all been turned on its head now), but the real driving principal behind privatising public businesses now is more to do with the quick profit opportunity for a small handful of party benefactors. You have a point. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... servatives "Perhaps you're wondering why the Tories talked so tough on banking reform before election but have done so little since. That may have something to do with the money the City gives to them. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in 2010 donations from financial services accounted for over half of all Tory funding."

At local government level it's not that they get hoodwinked but rather they are following an ideology that says the council itself must not provide any services directly but that they must all be contracted out.

They may select the wrong contractor and get a bad deal but the root of the problem is the ideology that lies behind it.

I'll give you an example. I have mentioned before my wife is a school secretary well the other day she came home an told me of the latest service the council has contracted out. Email.

By email I mean the maintenance of mailing lists and sending of email to multiple destinations such as all the schools in West Cheshire. In future if anyone wants to email all schools they will send an email to the service provider and they will send it on to all school. Schools themselves will be expected to use this service and a "Lite" version will be provided for them to do so. If they want any enhanced services (not sure what they mean by that) they will have to buy this service themselves directly of the provider but if course it will come out of the school budget and will require someone at the school to manage the relationship with the provider checking and paying invoices etc.

Now this is just another supplier my wife has to deal with whereas before she simply dealt with the council. It's the same for everything e,g, refuse collection and so on. The schools have to buy the services.

There is only one person dealing with all these suppliers at the school. My wife! She gets paid about £12K is year for this and she does actually view the schools budget as "her money" and saves the school a small fortune by chasing up incorrect invoices and so on.

However would you do this for £12K a year? How much effort would you be willing to expend chasing stuff up when you have to do this alongside all your other duties? The invoices will just get paid anyway if you don't and no one centrally bothers so long as the system ticks along.

If the council provided the services you would think they could benefit from an economy of scale, have direct control over them and most importantly they would not be being invoiced for anything as they were actually providing it. They would have clear sight of expenditure and wouldn't be paying invoices for refuse collections that never happened which were supposedly done when the schools were closed for the summer (an actual example of something my wife had to deal with).

G4S is so good at what it does, it recently won a new contract to run centres for rape and sex crime victims. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/lo ... ex-4007378

G4S is so good at what it does, it recently won a new contract to run centres for rape and sex crime victims. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/lo ... ex-4007378

Recently the Ministry of "Justice" at a stroke stopped every county court from issuing claims, they all now have to be issued from Northampton but the actual work is done by a centralised unit at Salford.

It is the most almighty fiasco, but in response to all criticism, they just churn out stats which "prove" it's doing just great, and getting better and better all the time.

I also have an ear on the inside which tells me that the in-house court bailiffs are now charging their services at rates far, far higher than private companies with the obvious consequence that anyone who wins a judgement will no longer automatically pass it to the court bailiff for collection - the surprising element to this is that the fees were arbitrarily increased recently from being competitive to a rate at which clients first reaction is "Eh? How much ?", those on the inside are in no doubt that their whole office will soon no longer exist within the civil service and that the arbitrary increase will be "proof" that the private sector can do the job "better". `