UK gov dials 999 over Serco prison escort fraud claims

They'll Get Away With It

After all, if Serco are found guilty, who will drive them from court to prison?

SERCO

I left when I realised they couldn't get laid in a brothel, plenty of people managers, no skilled employees, they draft in expertise at great expense to set up a project, then get the lowest paid lowest skilled people to run it, then just before renewal will "refresh" all the kit at cost price if the renewal is signed

Unintended Consequences

The peons whose job it was to sign the documents stating when prisoners were ready for court were most likely on a bonus, or knew they would get their arses kicked if they didn't get prisoners to court on time. People aren't stupid, and will tell lies to save their jobs, particularly when they are made to do the impossible.

Of course, given Serco created these conditions, they should have checked up on this. They appear not to have done so, and are being deservedly humiliated.

Good that it was privatised.

And if the the prisoner transfer hadn't been privatised and this practise was found to be going on what is the most likely thing to have happened? Nothing. At least with a privatised system you can kick some arses. With the civil service you can't sack anyone.

That the system encouraged people to overstate the KPIs is not a fault of the privatisation per se, it's a fault of the MoJ to not oversee the activities of its outsourced contract.

The title is too long

"an alleged disparity between Serco's PECS performance data and the "actual situation on the ground", the MoJ said."

I thought this was S.O.P. for all outsourced (public sector) contracts?

They get telly AND escorts in prison now?

I'm going to have to write to the Daily Mail about this!

Prisoner Escort - a question

Are Serco prisoner transport vehicles allowed to use bus lanes? IANAL, but I don't believe they are allowed to. Yet I see them doing this regularly.

Grr

"He said there were no indications of "systemic malpractice up to board level""

It does not matter if the nice board member took you to a Good Lunch or not, the directors have responsibility for all of their employees (unless, as per Joel v Morrison they are on a frolic of their own). The odd thing you can forgive, but systematic leads to a conclusion of a fundamental failure in the control process, the responsibility of which lies with the directors. You can bet that if every prisoner was really on time and correct the Board would be responsible for it, so they are responsible for the alleged fraud too.

Don't merely hand over "profits" on some weird accounting basis, fine them significant proportions of the contract value.

£2M profit sounds light - SERCO has a 5% net profit margin, so there should be about 5% of 2.5/7 (that's how much of the contract has gone) of £285 million at the very least, so more like £5M. Of course, "net profit" includes all the overhead costs that would exist whether or not SERCO did the contract. So they should be lost. More realistic therefore is the gross profit margin of 15%, so more like £15million. I could understand a number bigger than five but less than fifteen, but two? It's not worth getting out of bed for that.

Who in Whitehall sense checks this stuff?

Anyone genuinely believe it's limited to Serco?

Due to the lack of government oversight in general I would expect this to be common across the board. When companies employ plenty of people to massage the KPI's and run rings round the client. The civil servants supposed to be in charge appear to be outclassed and outgunned terribly.

Thats not even counting the contracts where KPI's are regualrly attained but the targets are so low any crowd of monkeys could hit them.

AC as I have more experience than I would like to admit fudging KPI data and scorecards. Very hard to totally hide terrible results but plenty of ways of mitigating the appearance.

Personally I would love to see the government end the outsourcing obsession. But if we are keeping it then we must be more ruthless and on the ball managing the contracts. That means bringing in an expert in the area rather than someome who worked their way up the civil service ladder but has no experience in what they are overseeing. We also need to introduce far harsher penalties for fraud such as this and hopeless performance. Would love to see permanent bans on any future HMG contracts as well as criminal penalties where relevant.

"I am deeply saddened and appalled at the getting caught misreporting of data by a small number of employees on the contract. This is a very serious matter for the customer police and for us," said Serco boss Chris HymanInmate #33de4db33f17.

FTFY

The financial justification for all of these outsourcing contracts has been very shaky - to the extent that they have had to include various fiddle factors to make them look even marginally cheaper than keeping the work in-house. This started with Major, ramped up with Blair, and, despite initial promises, has continued with Cameron; as I can see no real political advantage to the party involved I guess it comes down to money.

My own, minor, experience..

A few years ago, I worked for a local hospital trust. Part of my job was doing the accounts for the catering department (assuring involces got cleared etc).

The hospital got a daily delivery of fruit and veg (the quality of which drew a lot of complaints from the head chef in the kitchen), and paid the grocer around about £500 a day. One day, I compiled a list of what we bought from the grocer and went over to the local sainsburys (which was actually at the end of the hospital's main visitor's car park) to compare prices.

Even factoring in the expense of sending two or three people over there to do the shopping, we'd still have saved £100 a day, and got better quality fruit and veg as well.

Unfortunately, even assuming they could, the people that could have got the trust out of that rather restrictive contract, where not bothered enough to try and get the trust released. After all, it was only £100 a day. They were the sort of people who could spend that at lunch.

Surely not

Whoops, they're at it again!

(warning: Grauniad link) http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jul/11/serco-gp-out-of-hours-substandard

Serco not popular in the Nortern Isles

Since they took over the ferries no-one has a good word to say about them.

http://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/2013/08/02/wishart-far-from-impressed-b-sercos-first-year-in-charge-of-north-boats

Competence

From the article and comments above, one gets the impression that Serco has fingers in a very large number of government pies, and isn't doing too well in many of them.

Makes you wonder what the company's core competences are.

Surely the system should have been setup in that Serco would transport the prisoner to court and someone at the court should have taken the paperwork and had it time stamped of when the custody of the prisoner was transfered over to the court? You can't fake the paperwork when there is a time stamp. They could even do this electronically which makes running reports as simple as automating the delivery of it every month. It seems the entire system was bound for corruption from the start.