Quote:
Originally Posted by Stuart
In my experience, privatisation is the reason behind a lot of the wastage. Certainly when I was working for our local hospital, I raised queries about a *lot* of our contracts when I found we were paying way over the odds for some stuff (e.g. our greengrocer was charging enough that it would have been cheaper to send a member of staff or two over to Sainsburys to get the vegetables every day).
I don't have anything against privatisation as such, but there do need to be adequate controls in place to prevent abuse on both sides, and the government need to take a tougher line when negotiating the contracts. The contracts I've seen define how the government department will behave quite tightly (as they should), but the contractors are often allowed to do pretty much what they want.
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If you want to see wholesale abuse of privatisation watch the academy system of schooling go.
There are many ways to make a few quid out of a public contract, even when, in theory, you're serving the public on a non-profit basis. A usual popular one basically boils down to taking kickbacks from suppliers.