Police Privatisation...

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Married to Night Train
Location
Salford, UK
Every local authority I have heard of that outsourced their IT departments have ended up paying extra to cancel the contract and bring IT back in house. Private company strictly provide only x,y,z services, but any new requirements and they charge very steeply on top of the agreement, thus rendering any savings lost.

It's a tiny scale, but where I work at the Environment Centre, they had a contract with a cleaning company. A cleaner came in twice a week for a couple of hours. It was expensive, and the manager wasn't especially happy with the standard of the work, or the security (alarm codes written on bits of paper etc). So they got out of the contract (apparently at no cost, somehow), and now employ me and a colleague for less than the contract price, to work a total of 6 hours a week spread over 4 days. More frequent cleaning makes it easier, and better, and also we have a relationship with the building and organisation that makes us care about the job.
 

Night Train

Maker of Things
Is this the most mental idea ever?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/mar/02/police-privatisation-security-firms-crime
I know some people on here aren't fond of the police, but still.
Thoughts please...
I don't like it.
Mainly a trust issue and also a quality of training and service delivery issue. Some things shouldn't be run 'for a profit' but for delivering the best possible service for the available budget. And if the budget isn't enough then find it from a less important spend.
 
It's too late to stop it now. Decisions have been made, the previous cuts have paved the way for it, and it's inevitable. The only question now is to the scale of the privatisation...
 

TheDoctor

Europe Endless
Moderator
Location
The TerrorVortex
I've worked for an outsourced company. Our main - indeed only - target was to hit the Service Level Agreement or SLA. As long as 90% of calls were answered within 30 seconds (or whatever it was) and we stuck to the script then that's all the managers cared about. Many of us were temps, and the pay was low. Anyone who was good didn't stick around long.
The SLA is key to why outsourcing doesn't work well. The customer thinks the SLA defines a minimum level of service that standards will not fall below. It doesn't. It lays down the best you will ever get, and that target will be reached as cheaply as possible. If that means employing, say, IT helpdesk people off the checkouts at Tesco then that's what'll happen.
 
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