The problems you describe are largely down to process and rules which they have to follow religiously. I know the parameters within which PM’s have to work and they are ridiculous. They can’t actually manage the projects they’re managing.
I’ve also seen the so called value that comes from the private sector working on public sector projects. A shit load of money for eff all product. And you can’t fully remove the public sector resources from it. So you lose twice
I can’t deny there will be idle or coasting people there. Fix the process and they run out of places to hide
As with a lot of businesses, I dare say furlough syndrome has taken hold.
Human nature dictates that a proportion of society (workforce), most especially the younger generations, need oversight.
But these days some people find it too stressful to actually go to their place of work.
No doubt someone will produce a survey telling us that working from home is more productive, and claim that a sectional survey encompasses all industries
Absolutely, although if Burnham was honest about it he would also have some choice words for Blair, who carried forward her legacy regards privatisation and deregulated capitalism.
Depends on your belief system I guess. I can’t help believe this great divide of left versus right, privatise versus free market, wealth distribution versus wealth trickle down is what’s holding us back.
The world is changing and sticking with the ingrained dogmas does not fit what’s needed.
It is a weird one in a way as though people (me included) protest to be objective, our core beliefs are coming from the right or the left, rich or poor and so on, which bleed into the how to move forward (not that I believe there is a definition that fits completely individuals so (self)described).
There is a malaise in our being, in the West, a lack of direction that will continue to block a path forward. Somewhere like India or Pakistan or indeed anywhere in Africa or South America, it is simple - we want better. Their advantage is where they are starting from. There are so many places to invest in collectively, everything will help.
The West is overly developed and how we concentrate investment is not clear and may be we are consumed by the creation of (immediate) wealth rather than investing in actual things. I dunno.
Gas and electricity are a bit of a mix, with recent events I think making it look more of a failure than it really was - the sectors have seen major challenges recently. But some of the regulatory design was clearly poor.
I’ve been wondering about this. There’s a part of me that wants to look at the contract and controls rather than the delivery and lump all the blame on the private contractors.
At the end of the day, they operate within the rules of their contract. Is that where we’re failing?
Oh I’d add NHS as failure in progress to your list.
Telecom was a mixed bag. The mobile network was built with effective competition from the ground up and has functioned with minimal regulation.
The cabled networks have always struggled with competition, and the full coverage has never sat particularly well with for-profit operators. It also held back the development of high speed networks. Oddly enough, it is the mobile technology catching up with it that has probably given it the effective competition it needed.
I wouldn’t count the NHS in the group that have been privatized, although some changes were made to introduce some private elements.
The railways I think are very much a matter of the contracts. The incentives don’t seem to align with real public interest.
That is even more the case with water, but there I think the problem is more fundamental - it is a natural monopoly, and there is probably no way to eliminate rent-seeking. In the absence of some regulatory innovation that I cannot envision, sectors like that should probably remain in public hands. By all means, construction of the infrastructure can be privatized, but operations are simply too easily extractive at the public expense.
I wouldn’t disagree with that, but British Telecom was a disaster before privatization. Cost to the consumer was absurdly high. Getting a new line would take months, repairs were similar, and the line network in 1980 was substantially the same as it was in 1955, other than where extended to cover new build.
Technologically, it was badly outdated - and not for lack of innovation. A disproportionate number of Canadian technology companies a couple of generations ago were founded by British engineers who could not get GPO to take any interest in their innovations - even where those innovations had actually been funded by GPO.