and cutting costs to the bare bones...

If you award contracts on lowest price, you're not going to be getting the best calibre employees or adequate levels of supervision.

I note 7 people have been suspended but I'll bet the people who hired them, the people who managed them, and the directors they all report into won't be.

It's not often I'll agree with Burnham but he's spot on with this:

" Organisations start working to their contracts,, not looking after the child or providing the service it should be doing. This box-ticking approach will never deliver the public services we need."

It's on both sides - Supplier will perform to the contract but the YJB will only measure to the contract too. The contract management teams will think its 'job done' if the MI reporting dashboards show everything as being green. They'll be measuring G4S's performance against service level agreements that are easy to measure (and easy to penalise) rather than necessarily being service levels that ensure a good level of service. That's if the service has even been properly defined in the first place.

I've had the misfortune of working for an outsourcing company and negotiating these types of contracts and they are utterly s**te and not fit for purpose.

Posted By: CWC, Jan 11, 22:13:39