The Bloated PRIVATE Sector!

Much has been said about he the so-called "bloated public sector" and how the "bloated public sector is draining taxpayers and bleeding the country dry and this is apparently how we got into so much debt. But what about the private sector? Isn't that bloated too? Whose money is it bloated on? For example who is paying for companies like A4e and security firm G4S?  I have given just a few examples below of how the bloated private sector is taking money from the British taxpayer and failing to pump any of it back into the British economy and companies like A4e are just taking money hand over fist from the Government under seemingly false pretences.


A4e
Scandal-plagued welfare-to-work provider, A4E has managed to get just 3.5 per cent of its jobseekers into long-term roles.

Fewer than four out of 100 unemployed people who have gone through the firm have secured jobs that last more than 13 weeks.

Almost 115,000 jobseekers were referred to A4e in the ten months to May 2012 under the government's work programme.

The contract awarded to A4e by the Government is worth a staggering £45 million! And despite the company and its founder Emma Harrison being investigated by the serious fraud office, the Tory led government still continued until very recently to award A4e further lucrative public funded contracts.

Atos

The private healthcare company that performs controversial sickness benefit assessments has confirmed that it makes all its medical staff sign the Official Secrets Act.

Atos Healthcare admitted that doctors and nurses are asked to sign a document which sets out the basic terms of the Official Secrets Act even though much of the company's taxpayer-funded work is not bound by the terms of the Act.

Two doctors who work for Atos raised their concerns with the Guardian and online political blog Liberal Conspiracy after the company asked them to sign a document pointing out their obligations under the OSA.

This is a scurrilous attempt to keep people quiet and prevent them from informing the public what disabled and sick people are put through at the hands of this publicly funded company.

It is public money that funds this French company and our government gives it contracts which must run into the billions, yet the Department of Work and Pensions maintains they do not know how much it costs the public purse to run and they do not keep records - why? How can they say they are saving money when they do not keep records? How would they actually know? Surely the public has a right to know, especially when Atos does not appear to be doing its job correctly because of the high number of appeals (70%)  that are granted after the original Atos assessment has classed people as fit to work and stopped their benefits, causing people harm and distress, to the point where some people have actually taken their own lives?

Could Atos be costing the taxpayer more to run than it is currently saving. Who can give the answer to this question and why aren't they? This is our money. Time for the government to come clean!

Close Protection UK

Despite the criminal past of the managing director, Molly Prince of Security outsourcing company CPUK that forced stewards to work for nothing and sleep rough under a bridge for the Diamond Jubilee, the Tory government has awarded them a further £850,000 contract to supply stewards for the Olympic Games. Molly Prince has previously had five companies struck off by regulators after failing to submit company accounts. It seems that the only qualification that is needed for the Tories to award the private sector a contract is that they are a private company and treat their staff badly and charge the public purse as much as they can get away with. And people accuse the public sector of being bloated? 

Tomorrows People

The welfare to work ‘charity’ is another security company responsible for sending unemployed workers to sleep under a bridge during the Queen’s Jubilee have strong links with the Tory Party and have long operated as a charitable front for the political aims of the business sector.

Siemens


The Tory led government awarded German company Siemens a £1.4 billion contract which should have been awarded to British Company Bombardier, this decision will result in 1,400 redundancies at the Bombardier plant in Derby.
No German or French government would be so foolish as to award such a vital contract to an overseas manufacturer, threatening thousands of domestic jobs. The former Tory Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond, managed to keep a straight face without blushing when he tried to blame the previous government for his own government's decision to award the contract to a foreign company.


UK Government Allows friend in oil Industry To Award Contracts Overseas


The chairman of Tyneside’s OGN group, which makes frames for offshore oil and gas platforms, has said job losses are unavoidable because the likes of Shell and BP are not fulfilling “a moral duty” to link UK drilling licences to UK jobs on contracts worth more than £500m.

NHS pays £1,600 a day for nurses as agency use soars 

NHS hospitals are hiring agency nurses at rates of up to £1,600 a day in a bid to cope with rising staff shortages. The number of shifts filled by the temporary workers has risen by more than 50 per cent in a year-with private agencies receiving more than seven times the rate paid to nurses on the pay roll. Experts said the disclosures show how hospitals' attempts to improve their efficiency have backfired, with jobs being cut, onlyfor temporary staff to be hired at vastly inflated rates.The scale of job losses is fiercely disputed, with unions claiming thousands of frontline posts have gone since 2009 while ministers say less than 500 posts lost involve nurses.

UK BOrder Agency:


The UK Border Agency (UKBA) has cut too many staff too quickly and is now having to hire extra people, Whitehall's spending watchdog has said.
The National Audit Office (NAO) said instead of slowing down staff cuts when it emerged an automated system designed to save money was both a year late and tens of millions of pounds over budget, the UKBA increased the speed of its planned changes.

More than 1,000 jobs over and above the planned reductions were cut last year, performance dropped.....

G4S

The private security company which ran into trouble by failing to provide the promised number of security guards for the London Olympics. Theresa may the Tory Home Secretary refuses to accept any blame for the millions of pounds contract failure of G4S, despite her lying to parliament when reassuring MPs that the Olympic security was all going to plan. G4S has said that the LOCOG the Games organisers had pressurised them into keep staff wages low and this is why they had trouble recruiting and retaining staff. The truth is of course that both the company and the Tory government were at fault and this should have been dealt with promptly and not left until just 2 weeks before the games were due to start. as a result 3.500 troops have had to have their leave cancelled to step in to provide security at the last minute causing heartache and distress to their families. Many troops have just returned home after completing a tour of Afghanistan and had holidays with their families booked.

Yet another example of a private firm taking money from the taxpayer and providing a shoddy substandard service, if security of the Games was left to the army, police and PCOs and specials etc; instead of the government sacking all our public sector workers, then the job of providing a secure and safe Olympic Games for athletes, spectators and Londoners would have been completed efficiently and without this embarrassing debacle and well under the budget it has cost to hire G4S. In fact the head of G4S, Nick Buckles has said he regrets ever taking on the Olympic Security contract and admits it is a complete shambles. 

It doesn't seem to occur to people who believe this that the public sector pay taxes too, they also buy things, make things and move house helping to keep the economy ticking over.


Ever since "call me Dave"Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg assumed power in 2010, they have declared war on the public sector and public sector workers. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) 20,000 more public sector workers will lose their jobs by 2016-17, taking the total jobs cull to 730,000 over the next four years. I wonder if this 20,000 is taking into consideration the 20,000 serving military personnel. Recently the government announced that they would be making 20,000 troops redundant, reducing our army's capacity to approximately 82,000. If our police numbers had already been cut to accommodate Tory cuts to police funding and our military capability had already been reduced to the  shadow the Tories are currently reducing it to  and we had a G4S style debacle, where would the troops and the police have come from to get the Games security back on track? And what confidence for the future does this fiasco instill should we need to urgently call on our troops and police again? For example; how we would have coped with last years riots without the extra thousands of police that had to be drafted in at a minutes notice?


Magnify just these few examples I have given you over education, welfare the newly privatised NHS, police, fire, ambulance etc;etc; and you  begin to see just how lucrative private sector contracts are from the government and why the Tories mates in the financial sector and multinational companies and outsourcing companies all donate millions to the Tory party in hope of winning these contracts. For every contract that is outsourced to the private sector that is more jobs lost in the public sector. It is not cost effective as the examples I have given have demonstrated, how much is this outsourcing costing us in terms of lost tax receipts, lost revenue, consumer confidence and unemployment etc?


Suddenly as with everything we see with this government we realise that it is the it's the private sector that is bloated and not the public sector and the public sector is looking better value for money with each passing day.