An insight into what is possibly going on under companies like Carillion...
I was an outsourced Carillion hospital worker. Here’s what I learned | Polly Toynbee
Carillion had taken over this large London teaching hospital’s portering, cleaning and other services. Its cuts meant there were too few porters to fetch and wheel soaring numbers of patients, leaving wards and operating theatres impatient at delays. Before outsourcing, there had been 16 porters, but they were cut to 11. This is how outsourcing works – cutting staff and holding down pay. Agency workers were paid less than the old staff Carillion had taken over.
By chance, I was working back on the same hospital site where I had worked as a ward orderly 30 years before on the same grade. Before, I had belonged to the NHS; now, at one remove, I belonged to Carillion. When I took my payslips to the Institute for Fiscal Studies to compare the value of my wages with 30 years earlier, they found Carillion was paying me, in real terms, nearly a third less. That was concrete proof of how wages at the bottom had been held down since the 1980s while wages at the top skyrocketed, causing an explosion in inequality.
Surely it is the responsibility of the client to set the service expectations by the provider, and not just that but also to manage to ensure they are sticking to it. For an outsourcer they need to provide to their service obligations, not beyond that without paying.
Cutting staff and holding down pay, who cares as long as the service obligations are being met. Who cares is in context of 'how outsourcing works', because it doesn't...It is focussed on service levels...
The main focus is maximising profit. Meeting the target on service provision is secondary.
Well that didn't work very well...
Quite right. Make a loss and the service provision starts to suffer. Continue making a loss and trouble builds up and those in the know should flag up there's a major problem. Deal with it or else...
If you heard PMQ's yesterday Emily forgot she had praised Carillion in the past.
Her own tweet:
"Have I?" Thornberry Can't Remember Backing Carillion - Guido Fawkes
To be fair, that was almost three years ago. I didn't realise they were in financial trouble back then. Must be a slow day on Guido's blog.
Theresa knows Emily's twitter feed better than she does. Worrying.
This is why Labour's idea that the public sector should be running their own services will never work.
They cannot even supervise and manage a contractor who is doing all the work with very slim margins. (So slim they went bust!)
A contract is written to the spec you want. Then it is up to the councils to make sure it happens, or there will be consequences. How difficult is that? Of course if you pay cheap you get cheap services- but what you get will be in black and white in the contract ...
I work for a Global Manufacturer with a 65 billion Euro turnover and we moved all of our operational IT support to one single provider 2 years ago.The same marketing rubbish was spouted at the start whereby a single annual payment to one provider simplifies the process and allows for future improvements etc.Realistically, 2 years down the line, my UK based Level 4 team (cut from 10 engineers to 4) is expected to cover the huge cracks left by the outsourced operational teams as those within my Company that are in the position to make any changes at the global contract level are more concerned about protecting their own roles and don't want to put their head above the wall and admit it doesn't work.At the other end, there are Service Managers within my organisation that are tasked with holding the provider to SLAs but that is a fruitless task that feels more like herding cats so never makes any change.
My company is no different to the Government with the shiny (unrealistic) expectation that one huge single provider, with massively reduced skillsets and staff offshore, can provide anything like the quality of service previously provided by multiple smaller 3rd Party Application support companies that knew their own products inside out.However, the single annual payment can be heralded as a simplified method of management above all else.Unfortunately, certainly in my sector, single Service Contracts look good on paper but the reality is a race to the bottom when it comes to delivering the service expectations.