tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
My favourite bit about that is that he apologised for the language used, not the sentiments expressed.
Current Affairs The Conservative Party
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My favourite bit about that is that he apologised for the language used, not the sentiments expressed.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
There are four big auditing firms that, between them, have been involved in nearly every economic scandal and disaster of recent times (a fifth, Arthur Andersen, didn't survive being Enron's auditor). Of the four, Deloitte and KPMG were the internal and external auditors of Carillion; Ernst&Young were brought in to advise on the process of collapse and administration (but walked away when they realised there was a chance they wouldnt get paid), and the fourth (PWC) have been appointed as advisors to the official receiver.
That all of them advise the Government as well (on almost every conceivable issue, but especially outsourcing) means that this cosy little arrangement of theirs keeps on going, irrespective of the cost to the rest of us and the damage they have done and are doing to our economy and society.
Yep. I'm a non big 4 accountant. They are rats who overcharge you for the privilege of receiving a dire service. Ruin the industry and give us all bad names.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
Sorry, I didn't realise you were an accountant.
As an aside they (or Price Waterhouse at least) even turn up in Edwin Black's fantastic book about IBM's role in the Holocaust, advising in 1938 how profitable IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag was (who made the punch-card machines that allowed the identification of Jews and other regime targets and would later allow their collection to be arranged and to track them they made their way to and through the death camp system) and how its manager deserved his bonus.
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
Also becoming clear that they (KPMG and Deloitte, anyhow, plus consultants like McKinsey) were more or less openly managing the ANC's bribery, money laundering, and tax evasion in South Africa.
Episodes like Carrilion and the Paradise/Panama disclosures are not exceptions to the global financial and political system - they are the global financial and political system.
Black Belt Jones
Player Valuation: £25m
Ever wake up one day and think - I really need to stop reading the Guardian? I do, and the iffy new design might just be the impetus to break free from this terrible, life-long affliction. I mean George has been stealing oxygen for years, but I get a general sense of deterioration in the quality of the commentary. Some onion-like articles appearing nowadays.The PFI bosses fleeced us all. Now watch them walk away
George Monbiot
When contracts fail, the legal priority is still to pay firms like Carillion. Money is officially more valuable than life
@GeorgeMonbiot
Tue 16 Jan 2018 18.45 GMTLast modified on Wed 17 Jan 201809.29 GMT
Again the “inefficient” state mops up the disasters caused by “efficient” private companies. Just as the army had to step in when G4S failed to provide security for the London 2012 Olympics, and the Treasury had to rescue the banks, the collapse of Carillion means that the fire service must stand by to deliver school meals.
Two hospitals, both urgently needed, that Carillion was supposed to be constructing, the Midland Metropolitan and the Royal Liverpool, are left in half-built limbo, awaiting state intervention. Another 450 contracts between Carillion and the state must be untangled, resolved and perhaps rescued by the government.
When you examine the claims made for the efficiency of the private sector, you soon discover that they boil down to the transfer of risk. Value for money hangs on the idea that companies shoulder risks the state would otherwise carry. But in cases like this, even when the company takes the first hit, the risk ultimately returns to the government. In these situations, the very notion of risk transfer is questionable.
Nowhere is it more dubious than when applied to the private finance initiative projects in which Carillion specialised. The PFI was invented by John Major’s Conservative government, but greatly expanded by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Private companies finance and deliver public services that governments would otherwise have provided.
The government claimed that the private sector, being more efficient, would provide services more cheaply than the public sector. PFI projects, Blair and Brown promised, would go ahead only if they proved to be cheaper than the “public sector comparator”.
But at the same time, the government told public bodies that state money was not an option: if they wanted new facilities, they would have to use the private finance initiative. In the words of the then health secretary, Alan Milburn: “It’s PFI or bust”. So, if you wanted a new hospital or bridge or classroomor army barracks, you had to demonstrate that PFI offered the best value for money. Otherwise, there would be no project. Public bodies immediately discovered a way to make the numbers add up: risk transfer.
study published in the British Medical Journalrevealed that, before the risk was costed, every hospital scheme it investigated would have been built much more cheaply with public funds. But once the notional financial risks had been added, building them through PFI came out cheaper in every case, although sometimes by less than 0.1%.
Not only was this exercise (as some prominent civil servants warned) bogus, but the entire concept is negated by the fact that if collapse occurs, the risk ripples through the private sector and into the public. Companies like Carillion might not be too big to fail, but the services they deliver are. You cannot, in a nominal democracy, suddenly close a public hospital, let a bridge collapse, or fail to deliver school meals.
Partly for this reason, and partly because of the inordinate political power of corporations and the people who run them, governments seek to insulate these companies from the very risks they claim to have transferred to them. This could explain why Theresa May’s administration continued to award contracts to Carillionafter it had issued a series of profit warnings. Was this an attempt to keep the company in business?
If so, it was one of a long list of measures designed to privatise profit and socialise risk. PFI contracts specify that if there is a conflict between paying the private provider and delivering public services,the payments must come first. However deep the crisis in the NHS becomes, however many people must have their cancer operations postponed or be left to rot on trolleys, the legal priority is still to pay the contractor. Money is officially more valuable than life.
If a PFI consortium is contracted to deliver maintenance and ancillary services, these non-clinical functions are ringfenced, while the clinical services delivered by the public sector must be cut to make room for them. This forces public bodies to respond perversely to a funding crisis: nurses might be laid off, but the walls will still be painted. Many of the contracts cannot be broken for 25 or 30 years, regardless of whether or not they still meet real needs: again, this insulates the private sector from hazard, leaving it with the public. The risk lands not only on the state but also on the people. Carillion leaves behind a series of scandals, such as the food hygiene failure at Swindon’s Great Western Hospital, and the failings at the Surgicentre clinic it ran in Hertfordshire, revealed in a horrifying report in the Observer. Similar crises have attended many other deals with private providers:operating theatres flooded with sewage, power cuts which have left nurses to ventilate patients on life support by hand, school buildings falling apart, useless services continuing to be delivered while essential services are cut.
None of this was unforeseen. Some of us warned again and again during the New Labour years that this programme would prove to be an expensive fiasco. Even the Banker magazine predicted, in 2002, that “eventually an Enron-style disaster will be rerun on a sovereign balance sheet”. But the government didn’t want to know. Nor did the Conservative opposition, whose idea it was in the first place. Nor did the other newspapers, now apparently scratching their heads and wondering how this happened. There is no joy in being proved right, just immense frustration.
Risk to a company is not the same as risk to those who own and run it. The executives keep their payoffs. The shareholders take a hit on part of their portfolios, but limited liability ensures they can walk away from any debts. The company might disappear, but ultimately it’s just a name and some paperwork. But the risks imposed on the people – including the company’s workers – are real. We pay for these risks twice: first, when they are nominally transferred to corporations; then again, when they are returned to us. The word used to describe this process is efficiency.
Anyhow, they have also stuck up a piece by John McTernan on the public good of outsourcing, just for a laugh.
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...public-good-pfi-government-provision-services
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
TBH if McTernan is backing outsourcing then we will probably see the end of outsourcing within the next six months; he is even more of a Jonah than Dan Hodges is.
Talking about Tory scum - Anna Subrey the witch was on the DP the other day - what a self opiniated Tory cow she really is!
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
Isn't dp nsfw?
Daily politics a Polictical tv programme she was trying to justify the contracts costing billions in the government going bust !
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
Cheers. She's bound to though, it's pretty much the retirement + option for the spiv's.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
I was wondering where I recognised Tosun's hair from.
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
Think Carillion is bad? Wait until you see what the government wants to do with the NHS
Proposals for the health service will put billions of pounds of contracts into the hands of similarly structured organisations.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politi...it-until-you-see-what-government-wants-do-nhs
It increasingly looks like the collapse of Carillion will not only cost the UK many millions of pounds but also endanger the delivery of vital public services and projects. And yet, even as the government scrambles to clean up the mess left by the contractor’s failure, it is currently proposing to allow NHS services to be put into the hands of companies which operate in the same way.
Carillion already has a raft of NHS Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) contracts in the NHS, including owning and operating 11,000 hospital beds in a dozen NHS hospitals in England and Scotland as well as several General Practitioner (GP) surgeries and community services.
Under the PFI, builders, bankers and service operators like Carillion, rather than government, raised money and entered into long term 30-year contracts with public bodies to pay back the debt. The extortionate costs to the taxpayer of this private borrowing are well documented. In the case of the NHS, which has been paying consortium members including bankers and shareholders a high annual charge for private finance, this is fueling serious financial difficulties in many hospitals and across the NHS. With money diverted to private pockets, beds and services have closed and staff have been reduced.
Carillion has gone bust. Reminiscent of RBS in 2008, after the bank bought Dutch rival ABN AMRO, Carillion has been on a spending and borrowing spree. It has not just been raising money to pay for PFI, it has been borrowing millions of pounds and spending heavily to buy up companies accumulating debts of £1.5 billion. Now the Carillion days are over, leaving hundreds of subcontractors and tens of thousands of employees in the dark and at risk. The taxpayer is expected to bail out projects in the UK, and there are similar problems shaping up for projects in Canada and Africa .
Carillion’s website proudly boasts that the great advantage of public-private partnership (PPP) is risk transfer, but when the chips are down the risks revert to the public. The mainstream narrative blames public sector contracts, but Carillion’s annual reports disguise the real story: enormous transfers of wealth from public contracts to shareholders and investors, including those companies that were bought out. These sort of wealth transfers from the NHS to private sector operators play out in sickeningly real terms as underfunding, growing deficits, cuts and closures in services and beds and the current NHS crisis.
But what the public haven’t yet been told is that soon almost all NHS services could be delivered under a similar structure, tens of billions of pounds worth of NHS and social care budgets farmed out with neither parliamentary scrutiny nor public consent.
In 2013 all NHS property (except for NHS Foundation Trusts) was transferred to NHS Property Services, a Department of Health owned company. It is charging market rents and inflated property management charges to NHS trusts and some GP practices. These buildings were bought and paid for by the taxpayer or through public subscription many decades ago. Now NHS Property Services is being fattened up for the market. Government plans the sale and disposal of NHS assets to facilitate new PPP which will, in turn, help more failing companies like Carillion or boost big startup projects like Virgin Healthcare.
Not content with selling off the family silver and lumbering the NHS with exorbitant PFI, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and NHS England’s chief executive Simon Stevens have a new plan. Accountable Care Organisations (ACOs) which are the “next big thing” for the NHS. The government plans to roll up billions of pounds of NHS and adult social care funding and award giant commercial contracts to these ACOs for ten to fifteen years. ACOs are non-statutory bodies and can be established as special purpose vehicles, just like PFI operators. ACOs can include private insurance companies, property companies, banks, equity investors, and private health care companies as well as NHS hospital groups and GPs.
ACOs are an American import. In the US ACOs include groups of doctors, hospitals, and other providers. They operate in the most expensive and unfair system in the world, dominated by private health and insurance companies. So why would the government want to introduce ACOs to our NHS?
Stevens, the former boss of large American health corporation UnitedHealth says that “accountable care organisations or systems…will for the first time since 1990 effectively end the purchaser-provider split, bringing about integrated funding and delivery for a given geographical population”.
Only that can’t happen because commercial contracting is established in primary legislation. Implementation of the split, first introduced by the NHS and Community Care Act 1990, was completed by the 2012 Act with the abolition of the duty to provide a health service, and with removal of primary care trusts (PCTs).
We all support integration of health and community services in principle, but how does integration happen when ACOs would further fragment staff, services and care through ever-increasing subcontracting? And how do we unite the areas when health and social care have different population and funding basis? Social care is means-tested and charged for and health care is free-leading to ACOs potentially blurring the boundaries.
There are several reasons to be concerned about the attack on the fundamental principles of the NHS that ACOs involve. A full appreciation of the changes is hampered by the government and NHS England not having explained clearly to the public exactly what is being proposed.
This is why myself and four others including Professor Stephen Hawking have begun legal proceedings against Stevens and Hunt, crowdfunding £176,000 through over 6,000 donations. Our challenge is on the grounds that without an Act of Parliament these plans are unlawful, that there should be proper public consultation and that the principles which say decisions about our NHS should be clear and transparent have been breached.
This is something which affects everyone in England and as we face the catastrophic fallout from the collapse of Carillion it should be unthinkable to introduce more outsourcing and more long term, private sector contracts, especially when it comes to something as important as our NHS.
Allyson Pollock is professor of public health and director of the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University, and the author of NHS PLC.
Proposals for the health service will put billions of pounds of contracts into the hands of similarly structured organisations.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politi...it-until-you-see-what-government-wants-do-nhs
It increasingly looks like the collapse of Carillion will not only cost the UK many millions of pounds but also endanger the delivery of vital public services and projects. And yet, even as the government scrambles to clean up the mess left by the contractor’s failure, it is currently proposing to allow NHS services to be put into the hands of companies which operate in the same way.
Carillion already has a raft of NHS Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) contracts in the NHS, including owning and operating 11,000 hospital beds in a dozen NHS hospitals in England and Scotland as well as several General Practitioner (GP) surgeries and community services.
Under the PFI, builders, bankers and service operators like Carillion, rather than government, raised money and entered into long term 30-year contracts with public bodies to pay back the debt. The extortionate costs to the taxpayer of this private borrowing are well documented. In the case of the NHS, which has been paying consortium members including bankers and shareholders a high annual charge for private finance, this is fueling serious financial difficulties in many hospitals and across the NHS. With money diverted to private pockets, beds and services have closed and staff have been reduced.
Carillion has gone bust. Reminiscent of RBS in 2008, after the bank bought Dutch rival ABN AMRO, Carillion has been on a spending and borrowing spree. It has not just been raising money to pay for PFI, it has been borrowing millions of pounds and spending heavily to buy up companies accumulating debts of £1.5 billion. Now the Carillion days are over, leaving hundreds of subcontractors and tens of thousands of employees in the dark and at risk. The taxpayer is expected to bail out projects in the UK, and there are similar problems shaping up for projects in Canada and Africa .
Carillion’s website proudly boasts that the great advantage of public-private partnership (PPP) is risk transfer, but when the chips are down the risks revert to the public. The mainstream narrative blames public sector contracts, but Carillion’s annual reports disguise the real story: enormous transfers of wealth from public contracts to shareholders and investors, including those companies that were bought out. These sort of wealth transfers from the NHS to private sector operators play out in sickeningly real terms as underfunding, growing deficits, cuts and closures in services and beds and the current NHS crisis.
But what the public haven’t yet been told is that soon almost all NHS services could be delivered under a similar structure, tens of billions of pounds worth of NHS and social care budgets farmed out with neither parliamentary scrutiny nor public consent.
In 2013 all NHS property (except for NHS Foundation Trusts) was transferred to NHS Property Services, a Department of Health owned company. It is charging market rents and inflated property management charges to NHS trusts and some GP practices. These buildings were bought and paid for by the taxpayer or through public subscription many decades ago. Now NHS Property Services is being fattened up for the market. Government plans the sale and disposal of NHS assets to facilitate new PPP which will, in turn, help more failing companies like Carillion or boost big startup projects like Virgin Healthcare.
Not content with selling off the family silver and lumbering the NHS with exorbitant PFI, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and NHS England’s chief executive Simon Stevens have a new plan. Accountable Care Organisations (ACOs) which are the “next big thing” for the NHS. The government plans to roll up billions of pounds of NHS and adult social care funding and award giant commercial contracts to these ACOs for ten to fifteen years. ACOs are non-statutory bodies and can be established as special purpose vehicles, just like PFI operators. ACOs can include private insurance companies, property companies, banks, equity investors, and private health care companies as well as NHS hospital groups and GPs.
ACOs are an American import. In the US ACOs include groups of doctors, hospitals, and other providers. They operate in the most expensive and unfair system in the world, dominated by private health and insurance companies. So why would the government want to introduce ACOs to our NHS?
Stevens, the former boss of large American health corporation UnitedHealth says that “accountable care organisations or systems…will for the first time since 1990 effectively end the purchaser-provider split, bringing about integrated funding and delivery for a given geographical population”.
Only that can’t happen because commercial contracting is established in primary legislation. Implementation of the split, first introduced by the NHS and Community Care Act 1990, was completed by the 2012 Act with the abolition of the duty to provide a health service, and with removal of primary care trusts (PCTs).
We all support integration of health and community services in principle, but how does integration happen when ACOs would further fragment staff, services and care through ever-increasing subcontracting? And how do we unite the areas when health and social care have different population and funding basis? Social care is means-tested and charged for and health care is free-leading to ACOs potentially blurring the boundaries.
There are several reasons to be concerned about the attack on the fundamental principles of the NHS that ACOs involve. A full appreciation of the changes is hampered by the government and NHS England not having explained clearly to the public exactly what is being proposed.
This is why myself and four others including Professor Stephen Hawking have begun legal proceedings against Stevens and Hunt, crowdfunding £176,000 through over 6,000 donations. Our challenge is on the grounds that without an Act of Parliament these plans are unlawful, that there should be proper public consultation and that the principles which say decisions about our NHS should be clear and transparent have been breached.
This is something which affects everyone in England and as we face the catastrophic fallout from the collapse of Carillion it should be unthinkable to introduce more outsourcing and more long term, private sector contracts, especially when it comes to something as important as our NHS.
Allyson Pollock is professor of public health and director of the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University, and the author of NHS PLC.
zzr45
#MURDERINGSCUM
Pollock is a moron. Terrible person that’s done as much for the medical profession as myself. In fact, she’s probably created more work for it over her scaremongering about rugby in schools.
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