Be Excellent To Each Other

Unless you're going to go on a massive hospital and school-building spree this wouldn't work. And the private sector wouldn't build any more as the capital cost would be too much, with too little chance of return as there are so many existing hospitals and schools with which they'd be "competing". And people generally use the closest hospital or the closest school (notwithstanding the middle classes' ability to move house to get into a good catchment area, but we're not the majority, remember).

So you'd have the private sector trying to compete in a market where people will generally have to use the closest available school or hospital anway.

Not to mention how this would work with the ambulance service.

"Hello, emergency services"
"I need an ambulance, there's been an accident"
"Well, today in your area we have E-Zee Stretcher, who are doing a two for one on broken legs, or there's a special being done on massive chest injuries by Ambulances-R-Us".



Ergo, no real competition is possible.



I don't really count that as a public service to be honest, as otherwise cabbies become civil servants, and that's too much of a horrible thing to contemplate.



If you think competiton is practically, economically or morally possible with these, you're mental.



Take bin emptying. How would that work? What if everyone in a road chose a different provider? It couldn't ever be economic for the provider unless they had monopoly over an area, and then you have no competition.

Indeed it isn't. This is why there is a strand of "management theory" called "lean managament" - basically stripping everything back to the barest possible minimum. Every organisation, whether public of private, is carrying dead or extra weight of one sort or another - otherwise they wouldn't be developing such an idea.

My sister in law-in-law was in charge of this sort of thing at Ford.

So do I (well, sort of). Have done on and off for a decade.

Is there waste in the public sector. Fuck, yes. But by far the most wasteful place I've worked was private sector, so, horses for courses.

Private is absolutely as wasteful as private. However, private businesses aren't spending my money on that waste, and competition makes it difficult for them to just pass those costs onto the consumer, providing at least some motivation to improve efficiency.

You can't hand over public sector businesses to the private sector, it just doesn't work. I maintain that the current situation of public sector organisations mismanaging the use of private organisations to do all the actual work is worse.

This is where the notion of "choice" when it comes to education or health is utterly fucking insane. If I break my leg, the hospital I want to go to is "the nearest one that can fix it". I don't want a choice in the matter, all hospitals should be bloody equal. Sure, spread specialisations out a bit, but for the basics, they should all be properly funded. And run by doctors and nurses and NOT FUCKING BEANCOUNTERS.

Setting a budget for operations based on how many people might need them? Only being able to pay for 50 gall-bladder operations? That is ludicrous.

Because the public sector will waste what it needs to get the job done, but the private sector will waste extra to make a profit from the public purse.

Oh, and PFI can fuck off as well. I have a horrible feeling about what the infrastructure of this country will look like in 30 years and we suddenly don't own the hospitals and schools that we paid for.

How would you provide equivalence of service without somehow mandating exact salaries, doctor->patient ratios, student->teacher ratios and the like? And being willing to invest in extra schools/hospitals where necessary to accomodate those mandates?

VAT on your car. VAT on the maintainance of your car. Disposal taxes on getting rid of bits taken off your car. MOTing your car. Road tax. Insurance premium tax on your car insurance. VAT and fuel duty on petrol. The part of your council tax that's supposed to be spent maintaining and policing the roads in your area. Recently the M6 toll, now congestion charging and soon the forecourt tax. And finally, if you stick it out, the tax for scrapping your car.

Still better than public transport, though.

Yes, when they're acting in the private, commercial sphere.

My point is they *can't* get involved in public services without causing the same massive wastes of money as is caused by their current involvement in them under PFIs and such. They absolutely *would* be spending your money on waste, it would just be extracted from you by them direct rather than through taxes. And due to the demonstrably non-competitive nature of public services there would be no downward pressure on prices encouraging them to bother being efficient. Making changes to be efficient actually involves an outlay of money, would you believe it.



Make your mind up! You just said you could happily privatise the police!



It's just as bad as if we let the private sector run the public services wholesale. Either way, private sector involvement in public sector services is demonstrably a Bad Thing, however they're involved.

The railways are, again, the best example. The railways were run better, had better punctuality and cost less under BR. Funny, that.

No, that sort of thing would have to be done by tender, with one company being awarded the contract for a whole area after lying about the price it can do it for.

The what?

Heh.

But that's not privatised - that's the public sector sub-contracting the bin collections, as the tender would have to be be run by the council. If it were truly privatised, and there were true competition as Craster seems to think is possibe, every household would have to send out an invitation to tender for bin services. Efficiency at last!

Ah right. Like you sort of do for electricity and gas. Lots of fun that is.

Or as you've said, local monopolies would form and you'd never have a choice, and no one living in a rural area would ever get their rubbish picked up as it would never be able to turn a profit, and the few areas where it was profitable and competition did exist would have rubbish pickups every bloody day.

Indeed. Although it's a bit harder for a bin company to turn a profit getting its bin lorry to visit only 3 houses in every road than it is for an electricity company to send its little electricity demons down the cables to just you and Number 46.

The best example to help your argument, yes. The best example supporting the argument for privatisation is telephony.

However, I haven't once said in this thread that I think public sector businesses should be privatised, I just said it isn't impossible. What I have said is that something needs to be done about the ludicrous inability to manage the use of private firms for public services.

Or bins, police, hospitals, schools... as I made clear earlier.

Telephones aren't a public service, I think.

I can see (vaguely) the appeal of offering alternative choices for some health procedures and services, but the supply (e.g. opticians and GPs), not the actually funding mechanism. The European model of single-payer (like the NHS) or multiple provider social insurance (France, Germany, etc) is the only thing that actually works on so many levels.

They were when it was a public sector industry, surely! You're only saying that because they haven't been publically owned for 20 years.

And you're only making a big deal out of them as they're the only "public service" that could have been and was privatised successfully.

Privatisation I think has some good points but I think you're right in that to make it work it means probably worse service.

I do think we have a lot of waste in the public sector. Every little place has it's own Council which in turn has it own accountants and so on and so forth.

This again is no real bad thing, but surely having most or more of this managed in a more central govenment would perhaps mean better use resources.

I think we just need a proper re-think of how the public sector works. We all have to pay it money, we have no choice, so why can't it be run well.

Again there probably are reasons for it, I'm just not aware of them... but I'd like to know.

Because, paradoxically, it does not exist to make a profit. Or rather, if it was allowed to make a profit, it would be privatised toot suite. See the Post Office, Qinetiq, NATS and so on.

Also paradoxically, the one thing the public sector needs is for politicians to stop meddling with it.

I'm not sure where they are in the process, but aren't they doing this to the postal service too? Mind, that'll probably end in tears...

In regard to phones, I'd rather that BT was publicly owned. It should've had its automatic monopoly removed, yes, but competition from private sector phone operators would've made matters better. BT's still a monopoly in terms of landlines, just a privatised monopoly.

I'll have to add that you can have collective ownership of utilities without the State. There's thephone.coop for example of a phone supplier which is of the co-operative model...

Quite - as has been discussed at length here and on WoS, it can't work, due to the processes by which a domestic letter gets posted and delivered.

Do you live alone by any chance?

No, with my grilfend who also works, although only part time.

What's your situation, do you live in a house with 3 other highly paid working adults or something?

I think the middle point - that more centralisation would surely make for more efficiency - is what Labour have been exploring over the course of their government. And I'm sure that to some extent it has been a success. Where it hasn't been a success (except in the diversion of attention from central to local government) is in services that need a local bias - which would be most of them, other than those which have a national or regional scope, like large roads. There you end up setting targets centrally without regard to local conditions - worse still, this lot have then left the revenue collection to be a local one, so that councils are forced to raise council tax to meet targets they've not even set. That 's not incentivizing, that's just blame shifting.

Centralisation works for some things - Carphone Warehouse probably have a whacking great office for dealing with phone operators and the like, but they still have local shops (3 in Kingston alone, I think) each with a manager, their own books and so on.

What is interesting, though, is that the idea that public=bad and private=good has become dogma. Who says public services aren't run well? I don't mean they're perfect, only that for a large (enormous)-scale operation of course things go wrong, just as they do in the private sector. The myth that competition will sort it all out is just that - telephony or bank customer services, anyone?

I tend to go all Marxist sounding if anyone starts on the "I'm a capitalist" or "in my business" blah blah but actually I think I'm just much more keen on the free market than they are. My cousin's accountant in Wales is half the costs of her parents' in London. For the same service. Which can be done via post and telephone. Companies spend plenty on entertaining each others' reps, for why? In a proper free market they'd still use the cheapest and/or most efficient supplier. In reality they do business with people they like, those who give the best freebies and so on. That's not free market capitalism, it's patronage.

While I agree with most of what you said, do you really think that today's telephony environment is worse than it was 20 years ago?

Yes.

Bloody mobiles.

And directory enquiries used to be free.

From a price/availability/technology growth perspective I mean, luddite.

Doesn't really matter what they're paid does it? But yes, with 3 other working adults. It'd be yet another example of people too poor to afford a house subsidizing those who do.

The recent "Free loans" thing is making me very, very angry.

Surely the household is irrelevant though, as you're not financially interdependant? You're paying per person, regardless of whether you own, rent, on your own or with someone else.

Well, only to the extent that you're taking advantage of the current system to save money.

In Scotland there's less necessity to share houses, so I doubt there are many people in that situation.



How does that work anyway? Can I have one?

I guess Duds and his house-mates are splitting the council tax bill 4 ways, saving themselves a packet.
Like we had to do when I was a student - except students wouldn't have to pay anything now, which is good.

If you can't afford to buy a house, expend the effort otherwise spent on whinging about it on earning more money, and then buy one.

Right - so in actually fact those of us living 2-to-a-house are currently subsidising Duds. Just so that's clear.

and Richard Branson's subsidising you. And football players are too. That's kind of the way it works, but to switch it such that everyone pays the same means that poorer people - paying proportionately more of their income - would 'subsidise' everyone else.

Not really, our 4 person house gets 1 visit from the binmen a week, just like yours for instance.

1) 4 people create 4x as much rubbish and they're disposing of that for you, for the price of one.
2) And apparently that part only costs you £20 a year anyway (or £5 in your case) so why quibble.
3) My bin gets collected once every two weeks.

My point is that almost none of the council tax is spent on provision of services to your house, so I don't think you can genuinely claim to be less liable for it, even if you're paying very little within the current rules. Fair? Well, there's always some winners and some losers..

Yep, and we're paying twice the council tax per head that you are.

Drowned out by the yells of 'MAGGIE! MAGGIE! MAGGIE! OUT! OUT! OUT!' that tends to surround the community charge is the admission that the old rates, which the council tax replicates in a slightly altered way, were deeply unpopular.

All forms of local taxation have been unpopular and flawed... The rating system needed reform or replacing, but substituting it with such an obvious cock-up of a scheme like the Poll Tax was just plain bad governance.

Seriously. I got so fucking sick of the idiotic attitudes coming crom central government over the libraries. They're not making money because they're not supposed to, you bloody idiots. They pay in indirect, practically immeasurable dividends. All you need to do to see what good they're doing is hang around in one for a few months. Start putting the emphasis on making money and all you'll do is drive the people who actually need them away, and end up a second-rate bookshop which will make less money and do less good, until some cunt decides that the thing that'll get the kids in (and therefore visitor counts up - in yet another example of cretinous, point-mising target-driven service, in the eyes of these people it would be better to have five hundred people come in, look around and leave than it would to have one hundred people come in and use a textbook they can't afford to buy or apply for a job with a computer they can't afford) is to sell their arse to cunting starbucks. Next thing you knowo, they of course demand more say in how the library is run or they'll leave, and then all you have is fucking starbucks bookshops subsidised by the taxpayer. And that's only the libraries. I frankly don't have the strength to think about what will happen if the cunts get to privatising the schools.

Because they end up teaching creationism, for a start.

I know a child who goes to a CoE faith primary school. I read his school report from last year, and for Religious Education, he had a negative report seemingly because he openly questioned the religion and does not believe in it himself. Freedom of belief, eh? Let's hope no one bothered to go to the effort of dying for it, or anything.

His mother is apparently going to "convert" to Catholicism, claiming it's to possibly non-existent Irish ancestry, in order to get the child into a "good", but Catholic, secondary school. It's all so ridiculous.

The religious schools seem to be far, far more proactive in terms of indoctrinating kids and selecting by crazy belief these days, unfortunately. It's like we're sliding into a theocracy.