You might also be interested in
Replies (6)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
Strange result
Does anyone else find this result strange?
As I understand it, council employee does not believe outsourcing to be a good idea and says so, and then gets the boot.
The lawyers get involved, bayonet the wounded, strip the bodies and then the employee comes back to work, only now not at the council but TUPE'd over to the company he objected to in the first place.
Now, presumably neither he wants to work for this company and Mouchel don't want him working for them (but neither party can admit this) so I assume we can look forward to reading about Mr Parker's forthcoming constructive dismissal case.
I assume it will be the rate payers of Bournemouth who foot the bill for this fiasco.
Bayonetting
Well the only way an outsourced finance function is chepaer than doing it yourself is if the outsourcer bayonetts a chunk of staff. So I bet if you check in 12 months time of the 100 staff Tupe'd over there is less than half left and the other 50 have ben replaced by 25 Polish workers on minimum wage...or am i being too cynical again....and If I was the Mouchel FD I would give steve parker the nice job of telling hios 50 colleauges they are all down the road.....watch yer back steve you could be No 51
No surprises
This does not surprise me and common up and down the country. All in the name of 'saving monies' and saving the job of the FD at the Council. He/she will have done a 'Great' job shifting in house finance depart costs off Balance Sheet and has less to do at the office and get the same pay!
Not Playing to the Whistle
The outsourcing of public services to private companies would appear to be booming - one such private company whose affairs we handled evidently used the milions of pounds it received to run NHS departments to fund large directors' salaries and hugely overdrawn DLAs. Unlike solicitors, estate agents, holiday travel firms etc there was no specific requirement to keep the funds in a separate client account (and before anyone says so, yes there is a general requirement to separate funds held in trust that we considered, which the company circumvented).
Whenever I hear David Cameron, and before him Gordon Brown, banging on about throwing millions of pounds at the health service then it puts me in mind of just how such public funds are dished out willy-nilly, be they council run, NHS, or educational. Who in their right mind would throw millions of pounds at a company with no assets and no track record? The answer I discovered in our case was members of the "old boy network" would. I have formed the opinion that the reason such grace and favour deals go largely unnoticed and unheralded is due to three prime reasons:
1 The incompetence and general malais of NHS / educational / council staff: one NHS manager I knew bragged openly that she was paid £40k a year to sit there reading the newspaper; the bursor at a local school paid a large deposit for a room of computers without checking out the supplier, who duly went bust before a single computer was delivered.
2 The sensationalist propoganda dished out by the press, which focuses heavily on low-level scams, dodgy deals, and misdemeanours to the extent that people are diverted from the larger issues: everything from the rabble-rousing tabloids whipping up fury over a benefit cheat, to last Friday's Aweb story of accountant David Wilford's conviction and exclusion from the ICAEW for stealing £139k from the charity that employed him. Meanwhile, the more sizeable leakages from public funds go unreported.
3 The fact that nobody can quite bring themselves to believe what goes on: perhaps best illustrated by another Aweb report last week entitled "Osborne shocked by millionaire tax avoidance" (after the Chancellor had taken a butcher's at a sample population of 100 millionaires' tax returns). It's no surprise to me, and probably not to you, that millionaires will find a myriad of perfectly legal avoidance measures rather than stump up highest rate tax; one can only hope that when that penny has dropped with the Chancellor he might then be prepared to take on board the extent to which public funds often end up in the wrong pockets, whether intentionally or negligently. Perhaps his accountants are afraid of telling him that, in case they too get suspended from their jobs.
Wonder whether Steve considered
resigning.....we all have a choice....if you don't like it you know where the door is. Don't get me wrong....this is probably a ridiculus decision by the council, but haven't we all worked where stupid decisions have been made (and if we had been in charge things would be different). I have no doubt he will be on a good bonus to make sure things work....and yep he will be responsible for sacking half of those colleagues....
How many people were really needed to run the department?
I have no idea whether the Bournemouth in-house team were efficient or inefficient, but after reading the story of the German public official who admitted not working for 14 years (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/9200054/German-civil-servant-says-he-did-nothing-for-14-years.html) I wonder whether there was scope for tightening things up before the out-sourcing?