....more armchair politics (Part 2)

There’s an old joke about the French that they have 10 times as many laws as we do but they cope with that by only applying 10% of them at any one time :grin:. If you want to know which 10% are in force today (or, indeed, change that 10%) then you just have to pop round with a treat to Monsieur le Maire’s place.

It’s not so much about ownership, I think. It’s about (say) whether the state owners of the NHS can employ their own internal cleaning staff (or physiotherapists, or hip replacement surgeons) or whether they’re forced to put cleaning/physio/hip services out to tender. Lynch wants them to be able to exclude external competitors.

That and corrupt tory cunts wanting to privatise everything into donors hands.

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Because they saw the EU construct as s centre right capitalist enabling body. An example being the ability of global firms to move manufacturing within the EU to areas where lower wages and Ts and Cs win. Freedom to work anywhere in the EU doesnt really apply to the working classes.

Anyone else hear Rachel Reeves (Shadow Chancellor) on R4 this AM? In contrast to yesterday’s efforts, she came across as well-briefed and altogether less evasive.

Because I’m hearing this on the clock-radio in the bedroom and thus nowise remotely awake, I had to look her up. Apparently so great an impact is Labour and herself making, that search engines think she’s John McDonnell -

'sake!

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It’s really easy to manage this. You might need to tender a service, but you can price it yourself and be cheaper than any private sector.

When PFI was around you always needed to do a “public sector comparator”, which was the price to do it internally. It was always lower than the PFI price, so you added “optimism bias” to this price to make the PFI cheaper.

Now we’re back to ‘really playing by the rules’ versus ‘bending things to achieve the outcome you want’.

My experience in the public sector was that there was always someone who wanted the tendering to be done ‘honestly and fairly’ and who didn’t understand that years of experience allowed me to judge which suppliers would deliver the goods and which (usually cheaper) ones would introduce a good deal of risk and/or actual underperformance into the project. Writing a tender spec to eliminate the latter can be very time-consuming and is not always a skill that the contract manager has :frowning_face:.

The whole process of getting multiple bids etc is usually shite. Create an (aribtrary) “objective” scoring matrix to compare all the bids, use a lot of time and money to look at suppliers you won’t use then get told the answer anyway and make the results fit.

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Sometimes it worked OK, just as long as you could find a way of excluding the hopeless bidders from the process. The real problem was with the organisation’s internal compliance people who were over-focused on cost and under-focused on contractor delivery.

cost now… and we hit the most destructive process in all of business, annual fekking budgets.

In public sector these are (supposed to be) big no-no’s now.

I’ve recently done a few £million+ ITTs and the weighting options are now very restricted and the evaluation/scoring of responses is very tightly managed with a view to justifying your scores or opinions.

That’s not to say a number of govt agencies completely ignore or disregard the governance though :roll_eyes: (our agency 100% plays by the rules which can be a major PITA sometimes (always))

Have they made the bidding process a bit (lot) more accessible? It used to be very (very) expensive to prepare and submit, respond to questions etc, so very few suppliers could actually afford to bid. Hence Captia, Accenture etc being the only bidders for lots of jobs as no-one else could afford to

I was typically buying hardware at the £100k-£500k level and I’ve had suppliers call me and ask if they were going to stand a realistic chance of getting the contract or if, in fact, we already knew what we needed and were requesting tenders just to show that we’d gone through the process. The answer they got sometimes depended on how much I trusted them not to record it or write it down anywhere.

Yes (and no :slight_smile: )

There is a crown commercial framework called Gcloud which makes things fairly simple for cloud based services. That has pretty much all the contracts (call off schedules) pre-defined (and agreed with suppliers)

So if I wanted to buy 100x MS server licences I could just submit a request on Gcloud and suppliers can respond with pricing, I then accept a bid and we both sign the contracts.

For anything else it’s an open competition ITT and we use either Jaegger to publish the ITTs or contracts finder

What is the world coming to when a well placed back hander is nixed by procurement software?

Fuck you computer says no.

You need to submit your backhander via Whatsapp to a suitable minister

Noted

:thinking:

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Could be a clever move since most of the population have shown themselves unable to manage more than 3 words at a time and that they have an incredibly short memory - so that will be both memorable and familiar to them

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“Take back control. Not getting the chequebook out. An agile, active state working in partnership with private business”
Is this actually coming from a labour leader? Those soundbites could have came from BoJo himself.

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