Thursday, December 19, 2013
Cock-up Or Conspiracy?
Serco, one of the firms that dominate the custodial services market, is to repay the staggering sum of £68.5 million that it has overcharged for tagging services. The Serious Fraud Office will decide in due course if this results from malice or incompetence, but there are also serious questions about the role of the MoJ. Did they really shell out nearly seventy million quid of our money without rigorous audit checks?
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Incompetence, corruption it doesn't really matter, how the hell can such large sums of money just slip away. Fair enough if the private sevtor can do the job cheaper and more efficently then they should have a contract. but when so many contracts turn out to be a licence to print money and the service provided is poor then something drastic should happen.......has it....no!
ReplyDeleteIt seems the Govt can't bring itself to admonish properly the private sector.
And if there are private contracts the full terms and conditions need to be public. The supplier is providing a public service paid for by public money , so hinding behind "commercial sensitivity" has to stop.
A lot of government bodies pay vast sums without checking any of the work. The NHS in particular is known for this. I know of one case where a tile in a ward had come loose at a corner. The repair contractor arrived, spent a minute taping it down and charged £500. No-one even checked to see if the work was up to acceptable or even completed.
ReplyDeleteLook no further than the sorry story of the admin. of MoJ and its predecessor the DCA. Look at NAO reports on their finances and read the evidence taken by the various select committees over the years and you'll soon understand that once the old LCD started to change (2003) and grow all seemed lost. The civil servants always seemed about to get to grips but never managed it. At least the cuts are focussing their minds - hopefully.
ReplyDeleteDid they really shell out nearly seventy million quid of our money without rigorous audit checks?
ReplyDeleteWouldn't be surprised. The National Audit Office concluded last week that civil servants in several departments were unqualified to be placing and administering contracts, of which, I suppose, the West Coast Line last year is the largest of the recent foul-ups.
See:http://www.nao.org.uk/report/memorandum-managing-governments-suppliers/
Sadly these days losing about £70m from the public purse is just peanuts.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair in the context of the overall size of the annual budget £70m is peanuts in whatever era you look at.
ReplyDeleteSurely the question is: is it close enough for Government work? If the state had been handling tagging would they knowingly have over-billed another department nearly seventy-million quid without anyone even raising an eyebrow, or would they have billed even more?
ReplyDeleteRoss Anderson a security consultant over on Light Blue Touchpaper gives an insight into the frailty of the tagging system as administered by Serco at the links below.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2013/09/02/offender-tagging/.
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2013/11/03/offender-tagging-2-0/
This is simply another example of what happens when you outsource almost any service. The level of performance can never be controlled in the way it would be in-house, and the only real sanction you have is to sack the contractor and re-tender. My experience in the public sector was that the whole farce would then be exactly repeated, with the next contractor failing to perform to specification in much the same way as the first.
ReplyDeleteWhy should we (i.e. taxpayers) pay through the nose to companies that are making vast profits from public services by under-performing on their contracts? Whether they are dishonest or 'merely' incompetent is beside the point. Better by far to have the service performd more cheaply and more efficiently in-house by a workforce who know what they are doing and can be effectively managed by the organisation for whom the work is being carried out.
The sooner we realise the folly of out-sourcing, across all parts of the public sector, the better it will be for all of us, both as taxpayers and as 'consumers' of public services.
Don't be too unkind to those who scrutinize financial matters at MOJ. Such is the assiduity with which every expense claim of JPs is examined that I had one returned because they considered that it was wrong to the extent of 2p. No, I'm not making it up, and yes, they were wrong.
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