| This pattern of waste echoes throughout British government, national and local, Thatcher onwards. That's when we stopped governments being able to do stuff. Companies like Serco, G4S, ATOS and Capita have all supplanted "failing" public services by either promising to be cheaper or replacing another company that submitted a wildly inaccurate bid and themselves under-delivered. I highlight "failing" there because many of these failures aren't organic; a government has broken them and then threw them under the bus. After a few years of substandard services and a daily ragging in the Telegraph, the magical tenets of tender and PFI are just too tempting. We paint this picture of the lean bulging muscles of private industry, but it's the same problems with added layers of obscurity and greed. Worse is the transition from cooked-in-house school/hospital meals to having them driven in from a factory 200 miles away is you replace so much infrastructure that there's simply no going back. You used to have a kitchen full of ovens and hobs and staff who knew how to operate them. Now you have a room full of freezers and microwaves and the cheapest possible immigrants interfacing between the two. To reverse that requires hiring and training and investment. Who's going to invest in that when they could just keep selling them [awful] ready-meals? Or you sold your land to a PFI so they could give you a hospital. The catch? They get super high rents and "maintain it" at huge expense. After 20 years you've spent more than twice the amount it would have cost to build and maintain it yourself. It's loan-sharking. The tragic thing here is that many public services are the ultimate embodiment of lean. They do so much with so little and are forced to be transparent. They are people so there's obviously some variance but we've spent so long villainising these organisations that we've forgotten how good some of them really were before it was too late. This country needs to find a way to start fixing this. If I were king for a day, I'd start with a new nationalised housebuilding scheme. That would raise revenue (means tested rents, fair price sales), create jobs, lower poverty and homelessness, create new markets for local services. |