Results like these at a general election would mean Tory annihilation

[noblegiraffe]

Says a BBC headline this morning.

Anyone else stockpiling popcorn?

Don't worry change is coming

https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html

Yes agree with the point on democracy; this was all voted for by the general public. You get the leaders you deserve, and Johnson says a lot about the general public. Scrutiny of what a person has done, what they have delivered matters. Not the drum they bang at an election; any fool can do that, you don't have to listen.

I think it's important for the future to analyse past mistakes.

Otherwise you just repeat them.

As the Tory government did with covid, making the same mistakes of delay dither and denial over and over again.

@Howpo According to this https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/ipa.ppp/viz/PFIDashboard2021-22/Guidance about £10 billion per year

Apparently having a Cabinet Minister for Children and Young People would have solved all of that.
Presumably only though if they spent all their time with the trolley making sure he didn't veer off anywhere else.

PFI has produced schemes with a total value of £60 billion, that will cost £306 billion when paid off.

In addition to that, under PFI contracts, the contractors charge extortionate extra charges for replacing anything provided eg a school charged £25,000 for 3 parasols, and a hospital charged £5,500 for a new sink.

You may think that’s nonsense, but most people will disagree with you.

Matt Hancock wanted to decide 'who should live and who should die' if hospitals became overwhelmed, says ex-NHS boss Lord Simon Stevens, as found in the Covid Inquiry.

Christ.

Yes that was a prospect!

That government was terrifying, people who say 'they're all the same' are completely wrong - the Johnson/Truss/Sunak governments are nothing like anything we've seen before.

In effect he did didn't he?

Thousands died in care homes he told us he had "placed a protective ring around" when what he actually did was seed them with covid from patients discharged from hospital.

I don't know how relatives are managing not to smash their TVs.

I thought I was unshockable. I was wrong. Jesus.

Because the consequences of decisions made years ago is still relevant today.

Like PFIs - the repayments still have to be made and the Govt (i.e. taxpayers) is still contractually bound by those "old" PFI agreements for years/decades to come.

Like state pensions and old age care costs - a giant ponzi scheme where monies raised through tax was spent in the year it was received and nothing was ever put aside to finance the costs when people got older.

Those two aspects alone are causing current day obligations of billions of pounds per year. You can't just glibly forget/ignore that as it still needs to be paid for!

We need to learn from history. Today's politicians and voters need to know about past mistakes so that better decisions can be made in the future!

There should have been an inquiry and consequences for whichever incompetent fools signed those kinds of agreements!

That would be the boards of all the organisations that had infrastructure paid for through PFI. They had no choice, it was the only game in town. The incompetence was in the legislation that failed to lay down firm parameters for the contracts.

It is always easy to be wise after the event, when the decisions were taken in the heat of the moment. Fundamentally, that's the yardstick that separates the good from the bad in politics when history judges. In many/most situations, I am not sure that any party has a lot to crow about. They didn't fuck it up too badly is probably the result we should hope to achieve.

All governments are poor at letting infrastructure contracts. All of them going back decades. Shambles from Concord to HS2 via PFI contracts. Not to mention defence and NHS IT and other scandals. COVID is just another in a long line of misjudgements. We misjudged Hitler too.

Once you sell off/outsource a public sector team, say building mtce/IT the private company can then charge whatever they like, the Hospital/School etc has no one else to do the work.

My former company used to provide computers/network to an NHS trust, we would charge many times the cost of the equipment/installation/on going support, they had no choice & all companies tendering charged similar & once in for a 5 year contract, they were hooked.

On PFI, oh yes everyone is a critic but no one says where the funding should have come from instead nor how the NHS would have coped without these new buildings - i checked, NHS/PFI costs are £2.1bn per year.

fwiw on that sink, you don't know whether it was a new installation or a replacement (even its size) did the new water supply need testing? where it was fitted i.e work had to be done at night? whether lighting had to be provided? whether it inc taps and/or the work unit? where the plumber had to come from, did he/she have to do specific H&S training or security clearances? Did the hospital require a pre work survey, change the specification?

Its just a DM story with no context.

@Howpo

My former company used to provide computers/network to an NHS trust, we would charge many times the cost of the equipment/installation/on going support, they had no choice & all companies tendering charged similar & once in for a 5 year contract, they were hooked.

Yes, sadly I know how it works. I've had many clients who've been "approved" suppliers to the NHS. They're a joke.

The stationery providers are the funniest. They produce catalogues with crazy high prices - the kind of prices that no sane person would ever contemplate paying. Then the NHS procurement officers make out to management they've secured a brilliant deal in getting a 25% discount on stationery, and the stupid managers lap it up. But in reality, even with a 25% discount, the costs are still way higher than they'd pay anywhere else. What they don't understand is that more commercially savvy private company customers are given 50%-75% off the catalogue prices which brings them down to open market prices!

The same applies with building work etc. - the "approved" contractors charge far more for NHS customers than they do for private commercial customers.

It's no surprise at all that UK railway infrastructure and maintenance is so expensive - all the firms involved run a kind of cartel between themselves - they know what each other charges, so there's an "unwritten" agreement that they all charge about the same. The HS2 runaway cost is an extreme example but it's been happening for a few decades on smaller projects where it can "cost" millions to reinstate a mile of disused track - it's absolute madness that they get away with it.

@user1497207191 They get away with it because there are no suitably qualified or experienced people overseeing the contracts or the work. Most now work for the contractors. The prices overrun on more or less everything.

It’s actually made me laugh recently when, on another thread, a poster thought a degree in site management via an apprenticeship was what you needed to oversee the building of infrastructure projects. It’s not what you need! You need people to oversee the building of a project to be the same as the people who designed it but with detached oversight. In other words, engineers who are actually qualified. The government used to have such centres of excellence. Now they just let the contractors do design and build with below par professional input. So they simply use their full control of the project to rack up costs. Why would t you?

Most people (who bothered to vote) didn’t vote Tory.

Very true. We have an electoral system that creates majorities where none exist amongst the population.

So we all agree this pricing inflation is happening with or without PFI.

It happens because the in-house expertise has gone & is now in the hands of v smart contractors.

In my industry, IT, you ve senior IT directors wanting a new IT system based on a trade fair they went to or an article in the FT, they think they can project manage, order up a load of shiny kit and then realise they haven't enough power points, the new s/w wont talk to older legacy s/w, they never budgeted for training, the new s/w doesn't or cannot do what the older system could, no structured cabling in areas that they need SC in order to work!!!

and i kid you not, spend £10m on a new IP phone system, that then went out of s/w and h/w support less than 12months later, which then needed an expensive new upgrade in order to be compliant with the regulator, this was with a private sector company, the people i was liaising with would joke "we'll just have to put our prices up" and they did.

The level of managerial control over these things is incredible, its non existent, they have a budget and spend up to it, with zero knowledge of what they doing.

The important thing is to spend all of the budget for that year, otherwise the next year you might get a smaller budget.
Unimportant is whether that budget is actually needed and what you are buying is useful.

Indeed, public sector accounting needs an overhaul. It's a completely different set of accounting rules to other entities, such as businesses etc. No regard is made to spending on something that endures, such as an asset that will have value for many years, as opposed to costs, such as wages. That's why, at the end of a contract, bodies like the NHS just glibly sell off equipment at basically scrap prices (i.e. office equipment, computer equipment, etc), because there's no incentive for them to raise the maximum amount of money. Our local library had over £250k spent on it to renovate it, replace all the shelving, furniture, etc., install new lighting, heating and security systems, etc. They spent £250k because that was the budget! They could have achieved the same result for probably a third of the cost as it was basically a tiny village library! The stupid council then closed it down a year later. They actually paid for a company to come and take away all the contents - all they cared about was emptying it, they had no interest at all in actually selling the contents. Apparently, they "had to" spend the £250k because it was a particular grant that had to be spent or they had to return it! What a monumental waste!

@Howpo PFI is no more. Contracts let to spend government money are. Eg HS2. They are not the same but both have serious flaws. Building hospitals and schools is generally not a huge civil engineering project. It’s not as complex. However they all have capacity to waste billions!