Philip Green discovers ugly truth of government incompetence

And the implied solution seems to be...

...centralising everything. Yeah, that sounds *really* efficient.

</sarcasm>

Another reason to pull out of the EU

PBO's have to stick to EU laws and are made accountable by this, Does Sir Green have to do this when a Top Shop needs a computer? No he is able to send a minion to Tesco for one of the shelf, whereas a goverment body cannot be seen to do this...

piss ups and breweries - not within governmental capabilities.

see title.

hmm!

I await the tirade against Local Authorities to ensue!

WTF

No wonder Labour f%cked up the economy, education, welfare, health. They are incompetent and couldn't run a grocery store, along with many civil servants.

Gordon Brown was lauded as the saviour of the World's economy.....my @rse.

"significantly greater than they should be"

Yeah, but have you ever tried to work with some of these people? Does the phrase 'twat tax' mean anything to you?

Post anonymously - because...

Ooh look, big numbers!

Look at all the scary big numbers - they must all be bad! All of them!

>Printing paper varies from £8 to £73 per box.

Plain paper, verses watermarked secure paper with tear-offs or stickers (like you MOT certificate) perhaps?

>Printer cartridges range from £86 each to £398.

Maybe a boggo laser printer to a massive plotter for printing hugenormous A0 posters?

>Prices range from £353 to £2,000 for laptops.

Because everyone in government needs exactly the same kit, don't they. Nobody could need a ruggedised one, or one with a huge screen if they're visually impaired.....

I'm not saying there's no waste - there's cleary tonnes - but a bit of context please Reg. (Like how many £8 boxes vs £73 boxes?) This isn't the Daily Mail!

£73 per box of printer paper

Is this an usually large box, or does it come with platinum crown watermarks?

don't need to centralise everything

Just get the data centralised

Purchaser for dept A buys something for X pounds.

Purchaser for dept B knows this, but is quoted X+Y pounds. So dept B can go back to the supplier and ask why A got it cheaper.

Plus the general improvement in writing contracts and not changing specs all the time should be a no brainer.

The problem

is that Sir Philip's factfinding runs against government policy of spreading the wealth out, and let's face facts, if the government were to centralise telecoms with one supplier that would be 67 companies bankrupted overnight, a few hundred out of work and then on benefits. Going directly to the big boys would create an even large old boys network than currently exists and cut out the alleged benefits of freemarket economics, capitalism and cost cutting.

Not surprising

This isn't totally surprising - and not for the "government are incompetent" reasons, either.

GCAT (as it used to be called) was supposed to solve a lot of this, by central government setting up framework agreements that all departments could buy under.

However, GCAT never really worked - for me at least. For starters, for every order, the government department running GCAT took a 7% (or thereabouts) cut on every order. They didn't do anything. It was just their commision for setting up the contract.

Secondly, the pricing on GCAT was never that great. In theory, it was supposed to be impossible to buy cheaper than a GCAT price. In reality, it was easy. When I worked in a government department, I rarely bought under GCAT. I always went out to the market.

The other thing against GCAT, is that it favours the big companies/resellers over the little guy.

If only it were that simple...

... there are undoubtedly some huge savings to be made across the board in government procurement and certainly to be leveraged by its size. However the size and breadth of government means that some of his targets are so simplistic as to be laughable sadly. Striaghtforward example - get all government to sign up to a single mobile phone service provider. Fail - which of the providers guarantees 100% coverage across all government sites? Or which guarantees to have sufficient capacity to deal with the demand during a major national incident? Answers - none of them. So you're forced to take whichever works best for the particular circumstances unless you seek to address the coverage and capacity issues. At my site I am effectively restricted to a single workable choice of provider because it's the only usable signal...

I find myself incredibly annoyed by both sides of this piece. After 12 years of multi-channel retail experience I can fully understand where Sir Phillip is coming from because he and his staff have the freedom to make a decision and implement it without any recourse to outside considerations or requirements, except shareholder satisfaction. After the last 3 years in the public sector I can fully understand the complexities and the frustrations of having to navigate a way through the endless legal hoops just to buy pretty simple stuff. There is of course a whole raft of central framework agreements that in theory you can just draw upon, until you realise that you can achieve lower prices if you are willing to put the effort in on behalf of whichever department or body you work for...

And don't get me started on the piss-poor contracts! I've had the pleasure of producing the specification for and letting some sizeable contracts during my time with my organisation and they are delivering year-on-year savings and improved service against what was in place previously and significantly better value for money in comparison with many other bodies. By focussing on the outcomes to be achieved and not the technologies or mechanics of how it happens, suppliers can be set free and demonstrate the real value they can provide - this is how to realise the larger-scale efficiencies and savings that the ConDems are seeking, not by sorting out the paper-clips, print cartridges and phones

Coat icon cos I'm seriously thinking of getting mine for real, turning off the light and going to do my own thing. Public sector can go hang, it's so broken it can't be fixed

telecoms

if you look at the report itself, it says "Fixed line telecoms is the best example

Government fails to leverage its scale".

I don't know if anyone remembers when BT was publicly-owned.

As far as I remember the idea was that UK telecoms would quickly cease being a monopoly, and would therefore bring significant saving to the customer.

err. 26 years later, not sure if that has happened yet.

And it seems that one of BTs bigger customers - the government we pay for - is, instead of getting its phones at cost price, having to pay through the nose.

great stuff that privatisation.

and don't get me started on HMSO...

printer cartridges £398.

Ah, they must be buying OEM supplies from Epson or HP...

Yeah, blah, blah, big numbers.

I'm sure there's a lot of waste, but some of that sounds like a bargain.

£21M for 105,000 phones is £16/phone/month. I wish I could get a corporate contract that cheap for my SME.

<libel>

Whatever the merits of Sir Philip's plans, isn't it nice being lectured on cost savings by someone who's avoided billions in tax through offshore dodges.

*checks legal difference between avoidance and evasion*

</libel>

Missing Something?

It seems to have been forgotten -especially by those who bleat on about 'labour this' and 'labour that' that Mr Green who is telling us what to do keeps most of his money off-shore.

Yup, that's right, he's slagging off government departments while trousering the money he should be paying in taxes here. So before opening your mouths and putting your feet right in it- it's people like Green who are responsible for a lot of the shit we are in right now.

@AC 13:37

"I find myself incredibly annoyed by both sides of this piece. After 12 years of multi-channel retail experience I can fully understand where Sir Phillip is coming from because he and his staff have the freedom to make a decision and implement it without any recourse to outside considerations or requirements, except shareholder satisfaction. "

Yeah, except it doesn't work that way. Large organizations breed inefficiency and complexity. It really doesn't matter if they're public sector or private sector.

Ask anyone who works at a company the same size as a major government - IBM, someone like that. Do they have the freedom to make decisions on their own authority without regard (I think that's what you mean when you say 'recourse') to any considerations except shareholder satisfaction? Of course they fucking don't. They have to make decisions with regard to a baffling bureaucratic mess of regulations and policies and procedures which have accumulated over the years to try and codify various different people's ideas of what might ultimately engender shareholder satisfaction. As another commenter said, the principle difference between this story and the private sector is we don't get to see the private sector's efficiency reports. I bet if we did, they'd be just as damning, at the high level.

Note the reason for a lot of these cockups that people describe.

A contract written *either* by the supplier (possibly at terms slightly more advantageous to them than the government) or some Civil Service monkey boy who has no idea about cancellation or penalty clauses (You mean *we* don't have to pay if the department folds before the lease runs out?)

Just *look* at previous posters and note *how* many of them were basically due to this. ATT global provider. Over ride for calls in same country (I'll stick my neck out and suggest either negotiated in US for US global or some global wannabe).

So, why are we surprised?

Well, I'm not but it is a shame that quantifying stuff is so difficult (or so it seems).

However, on a downer: please to make sure that the report and observations/extractions from it differentiate between Government (the elected individuals making up Government) and the civil servantry assigned to enabling Government policy become practice.

The dilution of associating MPs with civil servant ways of doing things should be clear (clear blue sky?)

It always suits UK civil servants to make sure that dodgy things and practices belong to Government rather than UK civil servantry itself.

Platinum cover paper?

Why yes. yes it is. With some radium or other readioactive decay counter (to measure document expiry ages no less), biological tracers and luminescent waterprint markers. For use in those "Top Secret" or higher classification documents. oh and printing money.

"My dear boy...

.. the object of the exercise isn't to get he best prices, it's to be seen to be doing everything correctly."

In other news, the sky is blue.

FWIW a "Box" of paper is 5 reams and a set of toners for a HP 4700 runs to about 290 quid (yes you can buy OEM cheaper but they have a tendency to dump their guts all over the innards periodically - which wipes out all the savings you just made)

Some departments must be making major cockups though. I work in the education sector and it's screwed down pretty tight (look up "catalyst agreements").If I was to be paying PC World pricing for anything I'd be sacked PDQ. (They're only cheaper when compared with what else may be open on a Sunday afternoon. We dumped them as a supplier a long time ago for poor service, inconsistent products and pricing well over the odds)

Not just Govt though.

I worked for a very large worldwide firm that at the point that a 256MB stick of ram was £20 from Crucial we were paying £200+ a pop.

I queried this with the supplier contracts dept. and jokingly asked if someone was getting a kickback from this arrangement and was very promptly told to shut up and piss off.

End of discussion.

It's the contract, stupid

And as long as those in Govt are considerably less skilled (if they have *any* skills) at writing one the fail is guaranteed.