This is the most corrupt government we’ve ever had

Laughing said:
Sorry Mike, I don't buy that at all. The government are complicit in every covid emergency purchase
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They really aren't. I did some work for our procurement department early on and the people that do all of the purchasing for our hospital were still doing it. We had some centrally procured by Greater Manchester and distributed to GM Trusts but that was run by one of the Manchester Trusts, not National. Nobody from government were involved at all other than they had changed the rules so we didn't have to tender for any of it.
 
boromike85 said:
They really aren't. I did some work for our procurement department early on and the people that do all of the purchasing for our hospital were still doing it. We had some centrally procured by Greater Manchester and distributed to GM Trusts but that was run by one of the Manchester Trusts, not National. Nobody from government were involved at all other than they had changed the rules so we didn't have to tender for any of it.
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In which case I apologize Mike.
 
Foggysfplandiet3 said:
Roofie, I agree with your point about Marples of course but the Wilson labour governments were totally complicit in railway closures from when they were elected in1964 up until they were booted out in 1970. They fought the 1964 election promising to halt the Beeching cuts while the Beeching plan was reviewed, then went ahead with nearly all of them, including the closure of the Waverley Route from Edinburgh to Carlisle via Galashiels, Melrose and Hawick, all solid liberal areas so they didn’t care. The ones they halted were in marginal labour constituencies in Wales, as was famously remembered by George Thomas in his biography. Wilson and Castle were ruthless when it came to closing railway lines.
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Laughing said:
In which case I apologize Mike.
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No problem. The government did buy some stuff centrally and distribute it to those regional centers but it was a small portion of it. The majority of the people in the chain were just doing their regular jobs, or a more pressurised version of it and they were as heroic in getting it all sorted as the front-line clinical staff. (I just knocked a few spreadsheets up for them to keep track of it all so I am definitely not including myself in that heroic bracket.)
 
Laughing said:
In which case I apologize Mike.
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Why? The government have still spent hundreds of millions of pounds on unusable equipment using companies newly set up and with no track record. How did they manage to bodyswerve the British companies who already manufactured - or were capable of manufacturing - this type of gear? They weren't hoodwinked, they were looking after their friends.
 
BBG I was apologizing for calling boromike an idiot. He may be wrong in lots of cases, but clearly, from his experience that is not always the case. Feck the government, I just didn't want my idiot comment to be left unaddressed.
 
boromike85 said:
Wasting a bit of money isn't as important as making sure our staff had the PPE and ventilators we needed.
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Well it's a good job at no point during this crisis did our health and social care professionals need to beg for adequate PPE supplies.........
 
Laughing said:
BBG I was apologizing for calling boromike an idiot. He may be wrong in lots of cases, but clearly, from his experience that is not always the case. Feck the government, I just didn't want my idiot comment to be left unaddressed.
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Ah right, I missed that bit. (y)
 
I see that the chief executive of Serco, recipient of billions of public ££££ for "service delivery" is none other than Rupert Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill and brother of the recently defrocked Tory Nicholas "Fatty" Soames. Purely coincidental, of course.
 
boromike85 said:
Not always. There's a tolerance. Getting 90% of it right makes it worthwhile. Wasting a bit of money isn't as important as making sure our staff had the PPE and ventilators we needed. Tendering was pointless anyway because we pretty much wanted everything that everyone was offering.



Haha. Good one. Where do you think she gets her money from.
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90% tolerance? Are you for real? None of the items in the link were any use at all.
 
bear66 said:
90% tolerance? Are you for real? None of the items in the link were any use at all.
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What link? The OP? I have already agreed that he has taken the **** and should be punished. He has been able to do what he does because of abandoning tendering and yes, I'd say 90% is about right for the the things that have been purchased where needed across the whole sector legitimately. If not more than 90%. The vast majority of people and businesses have acted in good faith and ordered whatever they could get their hands on and most businesses have been been very helpful & generous and haven't resorted to profiteering. The good points of no tendering have outweighed the bad significantly. I wouldn't expect it to remain when we are not in an emergency, it has a time and place.

Do you have any experience or are you just tarring everyone with the same brush due to a couple of bad eggs you've read about on Twitter?
 
boromike85 said:
Do you have any experience or are you just tarring everyone with the same brush due to a couple of bad eggs you've read about on Twitter?
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I think you're being quite derogatory to bear66 there boromike85. It's well documented that The Good Law Project is seeking judicial reviews in respect of hundreds of millions of pounds spent on PPE from a pest control company, a confectioner & a ‘family fund’ held through a tax haven. PPE that the NHS will never be able to use.

It is estimated that the Government has spent £15 billion on PPE and associated items but if you think that we as tax payers should put up with at least £1.5 billion of that going to profiteers then you must be living in cloud cuckoo land.
 
BoroFur said:
I think you're being quite derogatory to bear66 there boromike85. It's well documented that The Good Law Project is seeking judicial reviews in respect of hundreds of millions of pounds spent on PPE from a pest control company, a confectioner & a ‘family fund’ held through a tax haven. PPE that the NHS will never be able to use.

It is estimated that the Government has spent £15 billion on PPE and associated items but if you think that we as tax payers should put up with at least £1.5 billion of that going to profiteers then you must be living in cloud cuckoo land.
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I'm not defending profiteering, I'm defending swift responses when necessary. I don't think it should be going to profiteers but it's the way of the world and whatever of that is illegal should be recouped. Profiteering and fraud are obviously different. But imagine the outcry if we had gone through tendering and waited a month plus to get stuff ordered instead. We might have saved £1.5bn but at what cost? There may have been no PPE left to order from anywhere. What would you have preferred?

This is a have your cake and eat it scenario, you can't attack the government for not acting swiftly whilst simultaneously attacking them for acting quickly. Ideally they would have had the requisite stocks already but they didn't so they had two options: The usual, slow bureaucratic process or a quick response which will include an element of "waste". Personally I see the one that prioritises safety and life ahead of finances as the better option.
 
boromike85 said:
I'm not defending profiteering, I'm defending swift responses when necessary. I don't think it should be going to profiteers but it's the way of the world and whatever of that is illegal should be recouped. Profiteering and fraud are obviously different. But imagine the outcry if we had gone through tendering and waited a month plus to get stuff ordered instead. We might have saved £1.5bn but at what cost? There may have been no PPE left to order from anywhere. What would you have preferred?

This is a have your cake and eat it scenario, you can't attack the government for not acting swiftly whilst simultaneously attacking them for acting quickly. Ideally they would have had the requisite stocks already but they didn't so they had two options: The usual, slow bureaucratic process or a quick response which will include an element of "waste". Personally I see the one that prioritises safety and life ahead of finances as the better option.
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Giving a repeat contract to someone who has supplied the same goods as before without tender could make some sense in extreme times. Giving a contract to "profiteeringbill", based in a tax haven and with links to individuals in government and who have never provided such services to anyone, leave alone government, would not come into that category.

Have we got our money back from the Turkish order that was delivered in part and the part that was delivered was no use?
 
boromike85 said:
I'm not defending profiteering, I'm defending swift responses when necessary. I don't think it should be going to profiteers but it's the way of the world and whatever of that is illegal should be recouped. Profiteering and fraud are obviously different. But imagine the outcry if we had gone through tendering and waited a month plus to get stuff ordered instead. We might have saved £1.5bn but at what cost? There may have been no PPE left to order from anywhere. What would you have preferred?

This is a have your cake and eat it scenario, you can't attack the government for not acting swiftly whilst simultaneously attacking them for acting quickly. Ideally they would have had the requisite stocks already but they didn't so they had two options: The usual, slow bureaucratic process or a quick response which will include an element of "waste". Personally I see the one that prioritises safety and life ahead of finances as the better option.
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Like I said boromike85, I didn't think you needed to go for bear66 like that. Regarding the 'cake and eat it' scenario it didn't need to be like that. Many European countries had their emergency procurement plans up and running by the end of January whereas we waited until the middle of March. You say the trade-off for wasting money was that we secured all the PPE we needed in the right quantities, at the right time and to the correct specification. Well we failed miserably as evidenced by the many cries for help sent out by health and social care professionals. Incompetence runs right through this Government.
 
boromike85 said:
Not always. There's a tolerance. Getting 90% of it right makes it worthwhile. Wasting a bit of money isn't as important as making sure our staff had the PPE and ventilators we needed. Tendering was pointless anyway because we pretty much wanted everything that everyone was offering.



Haha. Good one. Where do you think she gets her money from.
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Yea but its her goverment. Maybe people should pipe up against her cos moaning bout boris wont change owt.
 
bear66 said:
Giving a repeat contract to someone who has supplied the same goods as before without tender could make some sense in extreme times. Giving a contract to "profiteeringbill", based in a tax haven and with links to individuals in government and who have never provided such services to anyone, leave alone government, would not come into that category.

Have we got our money back from the Turkish order that was delivered in part and the part that was delivered was no use?
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I agree with you on the first point. I've already said that but I made the point that that person is to blame not the policy because the policy allowed more benefits than the headline negatives that you read about.

BoroFur said:
You say the trade-off for wasting money was that we secured all the PPE we needed in the right quantities, at the right time and to the correct specification.
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I didn't say that. I said we bought everything we could get our hands on. Obviously some of that wasn't up to spec but we got as much as possible when we needed it most instead of having to wait. If we had tendered we'd have had all the good stuff we wanted but less of the stuff that wasn't suitable but we would have had to wait for it. Instead we got all the same useful stuff faster but also got some rubbish. You are weighing up the cost of the rubbish vs safety for staff and potentially saving more lives.
 
FabioPorkpie said:
Thing is, the thread in the opening post is just one of many that litter social media. There are so many examples of it, it’s hard to keep track of them. Drowning in a sea of corruption and dodgy deals and mates rates, to the point that people are just becoming completely numb to it.
The apathy in the population, apart from amongst those that actually look into this kind of thing, is probably unparalleled. A lot of people simply don’t want to know about the reality because it’s too distressing.

It says something when the best chance of a reversal of the trend is a hope that the more moderate Tories, those with some level of morals, get together and stick the knife into this shambolic, amateur, corrupt bunch of absolute chancers.
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Tories and morals, strange bed partners there Fabio.
 
boromike85 said:
I agree with you on the first point. I've already said that but I made the point that that person is to blame not the policy because the policy allowed more benefits than the headline negatives that you read about.


I didn't say that. I said we bought everything we could get our hands on. Obviously some of that wasn't up to spec but we got as much as possible when we needed it most instead of having to wait. If we had tendered we'd have had all the good stuff we wanted but less of the stuff that wasn't suitable but we would have had to wait for it. Instead we got all the same useful stuff faster but also got some rubbish. You are weighing up the cost of the rubbish vs safety for staff and potentially saving more lives.
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Foregoing competitive tendering is one thing but non-compliance with any one of quantity, specification or delivery date is another. We have so-called procurement professionals coming out of our ears so buying £250m of out of specification face masks is a disgrace regardless of the circumstances. There are no mitigating factors here.
 
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