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| Had you heard of Serco before? |
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7% |
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| Yes |
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18% |
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| Yes - I work for Serco! |
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37% |
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| No |
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37% |
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| Total Votes : 94 |
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rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21362 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
 Posted: 07-03-2013 09:25 Post subject: |
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Whistleblowers 'significant' in raising Cornwall's Serco problems
Whistleblowers played a "significant" role in highlighting concerns about Cornwall's out-of-hours doctors service run by Serco, a report has found.
The National Audit Office (NAO) said concerns were raised that Serco staff were altering data about performance.
But whistleblowers' concerns had not been identified by "routine management" or the primary care trust.
Serco said it had taken "swift and decisive action" to improve its service.
The audit was called for after it emerged some computer records on callouts by the out-of-hours doctors service were falsified to make the service appear faster.
Subsequently, a Clinical Quality Commission (CQC) report found Serco was not meeting four of the essential standards of quality and safety.
The NAO report stated: "The Department of Health should take the lead in making sure that whistleblowers are, and feel, protected throughout the NHS.
"Whistleblowers are a valuable source of intelligence and should be encouraged to come forward.
"To help reassure whistleblowers, the department should instruct NHS bodies to publish their whistleblowing policies.
The NAO report states that last year Serco regularly had insufficient staff to fill all clinical shifts, but a review found that there was "no evidence" that the service provided was clinically unsafe.
Dr Louis Warren, who manages the Serco service in Cornwall, said: "Over the last six months the GP out-of-hours service that Serco provides in Cornwall has been the subject of the most comprehensive scrutiny and exhaustive series of audits possible.
"The NAO report has not only substantiated what the CQC and other reports have already shown - that the service is safe and well regarded by patients - but also confirms that we have taken swift and decisive action in response to the previous CQC report."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-21689137 |
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| sherbetbizarre Great Old One Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Total posts: 1418 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 30-07-2013 02:17 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Serco: the company that is running Britain
From prisons to rail franchises and even London's Boris bikes, Serco is a giant global corporation that has hoovered up outsourced government contracts. Now the NHS is firmly in its sights. But it stands accused of mismanagement, lying and even charging for non-existent work
In May this year, a huge company listed on the London Stock Exchange found itself in the midst of controversy about a prison it runs for the government – Thameside, a newly built jail next to Belmarsh, in south-east London. A report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate found that 60% of its inmates were locked up all day, and there were only "vague plans to restore the prison to normality". The prison campaign group the Howard League for Penal Reform talked about conditions that were "truly alarming".
Two months later, the same company was the subject of a high- profile report published by the House Of Commons public accounts committee, prompted by the work of Guardian journalist Felicity Lawrence. This time, attention was focused on how it was managing out-of-hours GP services in Cornwall, and massive failings that had first surfaced two years before. Again, the verdict was damning: data had been falsified, national standards had not been met, there was a culture of "lying and cheating", and the service offered to the public was simply "not good enough".
Three weeks ago, there came grimmer news. Thanks to its contracts for tagging offenders, the company was now the focus of panic at the Ministry of Justice, where it had been discovered that it was one of two contractors that had somehow overcharged the government for its services, possibly by as much as £50m; there were suggestions that one in six of the tags that the state had paid for did not actually exist. How this happened is still unclear, but justice secretary Chris Grayling has said the allegations represent something "wholly indefensible and unacceptable".
The firm that links these three stories together is Serco. Its range of activities, here and abroad, is truly mind-boggling, taking in no end of things that were once done by the state, but are now outsourced to private companies. Amazingly, its contracts with government are subject to what's known as "commercial confidentiality" and as a private firm it's not open to Freedom of Information requests, so looking into the details of what it does is fraught with difficulty.
But the basic facts are plain enough. As well as five British prisons and the tags attached to over 8,000 English and Welsh offenders, Serco sees to two immigration removal centres, at Colnbrook near Heathrow, and Yarl's Wood in Bedfordshire. You'll also see its logo on the Docklands Light Railway and Woolwich ferry, and is a partner in both Liverpool's Merseyrail network, and the Northern Rail franchise, which sees to trains that run in a huge area between the North Midlands and English-Scottish border.
Serco runs school inspections in parts of England, speed cameras all over the UK, and the National Nuclear Laboratory, based at the Sellafield site in Cumbria. It also holds the contracts for the management of the UK's ballistic missile early warning system on the Yorkshire moors, the running of the Manchester Aquatics Centre, and London's "Boris bikes".
As evidenced by the story of how it handled out-of-hours care in Cornwall, it is also an increasingly big player in a health service that is being privatised at speed, in the face of surprisingly little public opposition: among its array of NHS contracts is a new role seeing to "community health services" in Suffolk, which involves 1,030 employees. The company is also set to bid for an even bigger healthcare contract in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough: the NHS's single-biggest privatisation – or, if you prefer, "outsourcing" – to date, which could be worth over £1bn.
But even this is only a fraction of the story. Among their scores of roles across the planet, Serco is responsible for air traffic control in the United Arab Emirates, parking-meter services in Chicago, driving tests in Ontario, and an immigration detention centre on Christmas Island, run on behalf of those well-known friends of overseas visitors the Australian government.
In the US, the company has just been awarded a controversial $1.25bn contract by that country's Department of Health. All told, its operations suggest some real-life version of the fantastical mega-corporations that have long been invented by fiction writers; a more benign version of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, say, or one of those creations from James Bond movies whose name always seems to end with the word "industries".
The strangest thing, though, is the gap between Serco's size and how little the public knows about it. Not for nothing does so much coverage of its work include the sentence "the biggest company you've never heard of". |
| Quote: | When Serco made its bid to run NHS community-health services in Suffolk – district nursing, physiotherapy, OT, end-of-life palliative care, wheelchair services – it reckoned it could do it for £140m over three years – £16m less than the existing NHS "provider" had managed, which would eventually allow for their standard profit margin of around 6% a year. When it started to become clear that Serco was the frontrunner, there was some opposition, but perhaps not nearly enough. "Suffolk isn't the most politically active part of the country," says one local insider. "And the staff were very lackadaisical. It was: 'NHS Suffolk wouldn't made a bad decision.' So it was hard to get a campaign going."
Serco was officially awarded the contract in October 2012, which meant that hundreds of staff would leave the NHS, and become company employees. Within weeks, the company proposed a huge reorganisation, which involved getting rid of one in six jobs. This has since come down to one in seven, two thirds of which will apparently go via natural wastage. In terms of their pay and conditions, the hundreds of people who have been transferred from the NHS to Serco are protected by provisions laid down by the last government, but it is already becoming clear that many new staff are on inferior contracts: as one local source puts it, "they've got less annual leave, less sick pay … it's significantly worse."
Meanwhile, other people are reportedly quitting their jobs, and the service given to patients is said to be getting worse. "In my team alone, we're 50% down on staffing hours compared with last year," says one former NHS worker, who provides home-care to patients who are largely elderly. Thanks to poor morale, she says that the team in which she works has lost around a third of its staff, and she is also having to see to administrative tasks that were previously carried out by someone else: in addition, she claims, support for a new IT regime is "farcical".
"We've still got the same number of patients," she says, "so the workload has massively increased." As a result, she and her colleagues are having to cut people out of their previous entitlement to treatment at home. "That completely goes against our ethics," she says, "but that's what we're having to do." |
Full story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jul/29/serco-biggest-company-never-heard-of
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| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 1104 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 58 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 30-07-2013 08:12 Post subject: |
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Serco = the definition of all that is wrong with capitalism.
I still think capitalism is the best system that has been so far devised, but if you abandon the checks and balances and let greed rule this is what you get. |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4298 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 30-07-2013 15:59 Post subject: |
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| Cochise wrote: | | Serco = the definition of all that is wrong with capitalism. |
But isn't the ultimate aim of capitalism to establish a private monopoly, run for the benefit of a few, as opposed to socialism, which seeks to establish a public monopoly for the benefit of all? |
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| Timble2 Imaginary person Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Total posts: 7114 Location: Practically in Narnia Age: 58 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 30-07-2013 17:10 Post subject: |
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| Read that article and thought of Omni Consumer Products (OCP) in the Robocop films. In the original Rollerball movie the world of 2018, is run by megacorporations - just five years to go. |
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| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 1104 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 58 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 31-07-2013 07:56 Post subject: |
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| WhistlingJack wrote: | | Cochise wrote: | | Serco = the definition of all that is wrong with capitalism. |
But isn't the ultimate aim of capitalism to establish a private monopoly, run for the benefit of a few, as opposed to socialism, which seeks to establish a public monopoly for the benefit of all? |
Hence the 'checks and balances' - which exist in law in this country, but are no longer applied. Very many of our market sectors are monopolies, cartels or subject to illegal price fixing, and nothing is done about it. The checks and balances exist precisely to counter the tendency of human greed to distort any system in favour of the ruthless few.
A 'public monopoly for the benefit of all?' is exactly as likely to be appropriated for the benefit of the few as any other monopoly. Although I am in favour of public ownership of basic infrastructure, and also on moral grounds - no-one should make a profit out of supplying water. (No, I don't know why I feel that way about water and not about food - but I do most strongly!) |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2013 08:52 Post subject: |
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| Cochise wrote: | ...
A 'public monopoly for the benefit of all?' is exactly as likely to be appropriated for the benefit of the few as any other monopoly. Although I am in favour of public ownership of basic infrastructure, and also on moral grounds - no-one should make a profit out of supplying water. (No, I don't know why I feel that way about water and not about food - but I do most strongly!) |
I'm a believer in small scale capitalism, where there's room for diversity and some sort of concept of fair & reasonable profit. However, there are some things, like water, other essential utilities: power; infrastructure; etc.; healthcare; and public transport, where any state stupid enough not to hold on to them, is asking for trouble.
For example, what's the point of an inefficient, too expensive, overcrowded, patchwork, railway network, that only provides benefits to its shareholders? Some services, like trains, trams and buses, which provide a value to the whole of society, by providing the infrastructure that allows everybody to be where they need to be, are of benefit both to the private citizen and industry. The same for other public utilities. They are not cash cows, they're essential to the running and wellbeing of a society and by their very nature, being held in private hands quickly leads to either competitive inefficiencies, dangerous and monumental monopolies, or cartels.
And that goes for the handing over of the control of nationally sensitive information to foreign companies, like SERCO, too. |
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| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 1104 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 58 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 31-07-2013 09:34 Post subject: |
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I would agree with your list. Healthcare on moral grounds. Public transport - essential infrastructure. Power - again, moral considerations and essential infrastructure as well.
Where I felt nationalisation went wrong was where it tried to bail out companies that simply failed to compete or were the victims of bad management, British Leyland being the obvious example. Although to be fair government interference had already set them up to fail - not unlike Lloyds TSB being forced to bail out Halifax and then nearly going under itself.
The idea of outsourcing dubiously legitimate actions being done on the justification of being necessary to national security to overseas based firms is quite simply repugnant, even before the nature of the company in question is taken into account. |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2013 11:14 Post subject: |
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| Pietro_Mercurios wrote: | ...
And that goes for the handing over of the control of nationally sensitive information to foreign companies, like SERCO, too. |
I see on checking that Serco Group Plc. was originally a British company, but is now a huge multinational conglomerate. So, I stand partially corrected on that one. I still stick with what I've written though. How could any foreign country trust the 'cloud' services of a company like Google, for data storage, after the Snowden N$A revelations, for example.
I see that the US State Department doesn't even trust Lenovo laptops, because it suspects that the Chinese are hardwiring backdoors into them:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4997288.stm
What does that say about the security & reliability of other countries' and companies' IT products? Should we trust Microsoft, or Dell, more, or less, than Lenovo? |
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| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 1104 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 58 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 01-08-2013 07:15 Post subject: |
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| I wouldn't trust any of them. Why would you? What checks and balances are in place? What due diligence can you perform to ensure your data is as secure as they say? If you put your valuables in a bank you at least can go and inspect the vaults. |
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| bagins_X Demi God?
Demi God Joined: 06 Aug 2001 Total posts: 140 Location: Tropical Kent GB Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 01-08-2013 13:24 Post subject: |
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| Pietro_Mercurios wrote: | ...
I see that the US State Department doesn't even trust Lenovo laptops, because it suspects that the Chinese are hardwiring backdoors into them:
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I seem to recall a few years ago the US Govenment (or at least one department) were pushing to do just that them selves.......... 
Wm. |
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JamesWhitehead Piffle Prospector Joined: 02 Aug 2001 Total posts: 5779 Location: Manchester, UK Gender: Male |
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