A Very Private Country
January 18, 2009 by Ken
Filed under Westminster
I have recently seen several letters in my local paper questioning the practice of outsourcing the provision of services; this practice of course does not just apply to local councils but also to central government.
As a basic concept I cannot see how these practices can be financially efficient from the point of view of the rate payer – we pay our rates to our council in order that it can provide a service. That is not on the surface a profit making arrangement; in that we do not pay rates in order to allow the council to make a profit, but to provide the service.
The council outsourcers the provision of the service to a private company, which must make a profit in order to survive as a commercially viable company.
So for instance, the service of the collection of rubbish has been converted into a business opportunity. The argument advanced for this is that private companies will do the job more efficiently, well we are beginning to realise exactly what that means. Yes they can make the service efficient, but only for the good of the business, they have not improved the service but increased the profitability.
In the meantime a layer of administration has been inserted between the rate payer and the real service provider, which is in all cases is a private company which must make a profit, and is employed by the council on our behalf. We have ceased to be the real customer of the service provider our place has been taken by the council.
Rules on recycling have both compounded and hidden the problem, in that there would have been a lot of changes in the manner of collecting rubbish in any case and the extra costs would have to be borne by the rate payer. I am not decrying recycling, only making the point that rubbish has become a commodity something to be processed and sold in order to make a profit. Which I suppose is the point of the recycling exercise, if our rubbish has an intrinsic value it is less likely to be simply discarded. Of course such a commercialisation of a public service it is also, as we are now discovering very much dependant on the economic climate.
In every public service we have experienced a great deal of change, not all of it to the benefit of the tax/rate payer, in the refuses sector for instance some of the changes have been introduced in order to facilitate recycling but some have been introduced for the profitability of the company.
Separating our rubbish into different categories obviously facilitates recycling; I do not see that moving collections from one to two week periods does, that is a direct benefit to the company who have potentially reduced their collection costs.
Of course refuse collection is only one of the services that have been outsourced, nearly all of government and local council provisions that our society used to consider a public service that benefits all of us no matter where we live in the country, have been treated to the same line of reasoning; that the private sector can provide a better service than the public sector, even though in nearly all cases the private sector will only do so by reducing the service to a profit making exercise for private companies.
This in all cases means higher costs to the taxpayer a reduction of the service and the displacement of the taxpayer by the introduction of an added layer of administration and the outsourcing of not only the service but the responsibility and the separation of government accountability from the tax payer.
All this is a rather worrying development in itself, but the government is now introducing the private sector into areas where I feel they have no moral justification for doing so. Privatising prison escort service and privatising prisons to me seem inconstant with the concept of state powers and our protections against the state. We are now giving private firms the power of the state ie. to detain people against their will.
But now we have the idea of a private police, six new groups of privately sponsored police have recently been introduced into the Met and are being deployed in a number of the provincial forces.
Although they belong to the part-time, normally unpaid branch of the police – the so-called ’special constables’ have their time and training paid for by private sector employers who agree to loan them to the police for 200 hours a year.
That is just one example of the gradual privatisation, there is of course another private company that uses the service of full time servicing police offices to set up special units. Units that unlike existing police forces, do not have to answer publicly to a police authority – a body which is usually made up of local politicians and members of the public. Unlike police forces, are not required to provide any information under the Freedom of Information Act. They appear able to operate without justifying their actions to anyone, save the Home Secretary.
The units are:
National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit
National Public Order Intelligence Unit
National Domestic Extremism Team
And they are employed by an association that has the status of a private company limited by guarantee. This company is, the Association of Chief Police Officers. ACPO in Scotland (Acpos)
These private companies say they work in the public interest and, in equal and active partnership with Government and the Association of Police Authorities.
They lead and co-ordinate the direction and development of the police service in the UK. Not only that but they advise the government on all legal matters and act as their own media managers often releasing their advise to the government and releasing press reports on all issues concerning the law, thereby creating an impetus for the changes in the law that will best serve the police.
Such as a call for a change in employment law so “priority could be given to minority ethnic and female applicants”. Or the call to scrap the right to trial by jury
As a private company they are not part of the usual police service but are effectively a private police service answerable only to the home sectary that has been inserted above our police and been given the authority to coordinate police actions and also to conclude government procurement agreements. Such as the one with Computacenter which has been awarded a multi-million pound agreement for supplying software and associated services to the criminal justice sector.
Under the contract with the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), criminal justice organisations will be able to take advantage of Computacenter’s extensive software licensing and management expertise.
The three-year agreement is expected to be worth up to £5 million per annum, and will help the Home Office organisations, fire services and police forces in the UK improve the financial and operational management of their software portfolios.
The Association of Chief Police Officers is a private, think tank, political pressure group, and private club for top cops, which is blurring the functions between itself a non-statutory organisation and the actual police.
The job of the police is to enforce the law, not interpret it and certainly not to instigate it by media or political pressure, we already have an organisation do instigate our laws and that is Parliament, not that this present crop on incumbents seem to realise this fact.
