Bishop V Hooper

[La Colombe]

IOM: 1 bishop

 

An acceptable answer on this week's Only Connect! I don't get many right but I'm having that! Anyone else? 

[La Colombe]

It was kind of a guess though. 

[La Colombe]

Here @ 02:26.

[Stu Peters]

45 minutes ago, Cueey Lewis And The News said:

It isn’t. Stu is on £70,000 a year plus pension plus expenses to represent the people of Middle. And he seems to have completely run out of ideas already other than to do a bit of victim claiming on an anonymous forum. Maybe he’d like to lay out clearly what he thinks he has achieved so far for the people funding his lifestyle? 

See, this is the problem with trying to have a sensible discussion. By the way, the job doesn’t pay me expenses (or a pension). What have I done in (just over) 2 years? The job of MHK. I don’t keep score of the successes and failures that go into doing that job.

To NBs more reasonable question, the civil service has grown partly because of the amount of time it takes to answer relentless serial FOI requests and apparently pointless parliamentary questions. The whole world is increasingly risk averse, so every work stream involves countless committees and experts to produce a paper trail so that everybody can sleep at night. 

I’ve said before but it bears repeating: if you have a pothole, I’d prefer to send a bloke round tomorrow with a bucket of tar and a bucket of gravel to fix it. Instead we have to have surveys, priority lists, budget approvals, an engineer’s report, sign-offs by various people and put the work out to tender, then organise road closures, consultations with stakeholders and all that other bureaucratic BS to try to ensure efficiency and best value, all the time recording every action as it almost certainly WILL be challenged by somebody, sometime.

Trust me, it drives me NUTS! But I’m an old gammon who used to stand or fall on every decision I made, which is complete anathema to organisations today. That goes for much of my work. When people ask ‘what have you done’ I can only reply that I’ve done my best to bring some common sense to the job. But I can’t wander through government like Alan Sugar firing people I don’t rate.

I’m not looking for sympathy or respect - I get reasonably well paid for the responsibility I shoulder. But I get cross at all those whose answer to our problems (which by the way were mostly brought about by external factors outside our control) is to fire all our ‘useless’ MHKs, disband our ‘part time Legislative Council, sack most of our ‘fat cat’ civil servants and hope for the best. Hence my question - ‘what would YOU do?’.

There is no low-hanging fruit or any simple solutions, and the sooner people start to consider the unintended consequences of this kind of thinking, the better. I’ve not been ‘assimilated by The Borg’ and am beholden to nobody, but my understanding of government has (understandably I think) changed since becoming a member of Tynwald.

[Dirty Buggane]

 The whole world is increasingly risk averse, so every work stream involves countless committees and experts to produce a paper trail so that everybody can sleep at night. 

And then destroy said paper/computer trail when it all goes tits up and so avoid any blame and (Ha Ha Haaaaa Haa Ha)Consequences .

"Responsibility I shoulder" you know as most other people do there is no accountability in club Tynwald

[Chie]

1 hour ago, Stu Peters said:

See, this is the problem

I have a couple question that perhaps you can answer.

Why do all possible jobs have to go out to tender? Has the government ever considered having its own building works department? Is it cheaper to put things out to tender or would it be more cost effective to have your own construction section?

As an outsider, all we see is a job going out to tender, let's take the promenade. And then a greedy eyed company, such as Auldyn, pricing it at 120 million, and then proceeding to fuck around (covid excluded) for four years, most of the time having roughly 6 people max working on site. Adding insult to injury by claiming "more profitable work elsewhere", and delivering a product that is very rough around the edges, unfinished in parts and not at all what we were promised.

It just seems as an outsider that companies see the words "government job" and their eyes light up, hands start rubbing and their finger slips a 0 on the calculator.

I can give a smaller example of this. I won't name the government department I recently resigned from, but, they were talking about moving their office location in the building from one side to the other. All necessary infrastructure was already installed in the new room, all they needed was two desks, two computers, three filing cabinets and a few other small bits moving down to the new room. So they consulted an outside company and got quoted £2000....for moving a few items. Yet, out of curiosity, I queried a similar sized fake job as a private citizen with them and got quoted less than £300.

Another example, with the same department, was when they were considering extending the current office, into the room next to it, by knocking down a 2m by 3m part of one wall. The job description was simple, knock through the wall, seal off (unsure of terminology) the edges, paint and viola bigger office. There were no cables in the wall, nothing needed moving, just a simple knock through, seal off and repaint in basic ass white. The cost form an external company? Quite a bit north of £7000.

I do need to point out, I am not a builder, so before anyone jumps on me, I don't know the exact ins and outs of this particular area, just a curious query based on an outsiders observation.

[HeteroErectus]

2 hours ago, Stu Peters said:

There is no low-hanging fruit or any simple solutions, and the sooner people start to consider the unintended consequences of this kind of thinking, the better. I’ve not been ‘assimilated by The Borg’ and am beholden to nobody, but my understanding of government has (understandably I think) changed since becoming a member of Tynwald.

What advice would you wish to pass on to potential MHKs?

[Stu Peters]

Good questions Chie, and I don’t know all the answers, but suggest that tendering is a requirement in most projects as there often aren’t enough employees within government to take them on (without taking them off core services), the public expects the bigger schemes to go to firms with specialist skills, transparency, the desire to share the budgets with private sector firms, etc. Interestingly I believe the superb resurfacing job to the south of the Cooil Road roundabout was done by a DOI team.

I think it’s the case everywhere that contractors have a ‘special’ rate card for government work, and unless someone tenders a significant amount less (I suspect hat rarely happens, and certainly have no evidence of a price fixing cartel)  there’s no option but to pay the ‘going’ rate. When an off-island firm wins a contract (presumably on cost), there’s an outcry. Of course I appreciate that contracts aren’t solely awarded on price.

I think there’s probably a lot more outsourcing than decades ago, and presume that’s down to accountants making a case for reducing a major ongoing cost (staff with benefits) for an ‘as needed’ solution.

I take your point about minor works too. In my prime I’d have reached for a sledgehammer myself, but that would probably be a sackable offence nowadays.

[Stu Peters]

4 minutes ago, HeteroErectus said:

What advice would you wish to pass on to potential MHKs?

Be true to your own values (that’s hopefully why you were elected), realise at the outset that you can’t change the world by yourself although you can steer and influence decisions, admit it if you screw up, make decisions with a good conscience and be open to learning from people who think differently. And stay off social media, obvs!

[Cueey Lewis And The News]

6 hours ago, Stu Peters said:

See, this is the problem with trying to have a sensible discussion. By the way, the job doesn’t pay me expenses (or a pension). What have I done in (just over) 2 years? The job of MHK. I don’t keep score of the successes and failures that go into doing that job.

So not very much then. 

[Harry Lamb]

5 hours ago, Stu Peters said:

Good questions Chie, and I don’t know all the answers, but suggest that tendering is a requirement in most projects as there often aren’t enough employees within government to take them on (without taking them off core services), the public expects the bigger schemes to go to firms with specialist skills, transparency, the desire to share the budgets with private sector firms, etc. Interestingly I believe the superb resurfacing job to the south of the Cooil Road roundabout was done by a DOI team.

I think it’s the case everywhere that contractors have a ‘special’ rate card for government work, and unless someone tenders a significant amount less (I suspect hat rarely happens, and certainly have no evidence of a price fixing cartel)  there’s no option but to pay the ‘going’ rate. When an off-island firm wins a contract (presumably on cost), there’s an outcry. Of course I appreciate that contracts aren’t solely awarded on price.

I think there’s probably a lot more outsourcing than decades ago, and presume that’s down to accountants making a case for reducing a major ongoing cost (staff with benefits) for an ‘as needed’ solution.

I take your point about minor works too. In my prime I’d have reached for a sledgehammer myself, but that would probably be a sackable offence nowadays.

It wasn't 'accountants' who got rid of staff, it was Thatcherite politicians with their mania for privatising everything: it wasn't always a good idea.

[Beelzebub3]

12 hours ago, Stu Peters said:

So, for the sake of a heated debate, suppose we sack everyone tomorrow (including most civil servants I presume from threads like this). What do we replace them with to run the Island better?

A monkey!

[Gladys]

7 minutes ago, Harry Lamb said:

It wasn't 'accountants' who got rid of staff, it was Thatcherite politicians with their mania for privatising everything: it wasn't always a good idea.

Indeed, 'outsourcing' as it was known, creating huge private firms devoted to doing what the public sector used to do for itself. 

[Non-Believer]

8 hours ago, Stu Peters said:

I’ve said before but it bears repeating: if you have a pothole, I’d prefer to send a bloke round tomorrow with a bucket of tar and a bucket of gravel to fix it. Instead we have to have surveys, priority lists, budget approvals, an engineer’s report, sign-offs by various people and put the work out to tender, then organise road closures, consultations with stakeholders and all that other bureaucratic BS to try to ensure efficiency and best value, all the time recording every action as it almost certainly WILL be challenged by somebody, sometime.

Stu, apart from not answering any of my previous questions, how long do you think that the public finances can sustain the growing ratio of say, 10 pen-pushers to one bucket-carrier as you've exemplified above? Or is the answer, as per current thinking, to just endlessly raise taxes to pay for it?

How much of this is job-creation jobs for mates and empire-building, has anybody really asked the questions? I'm ex public sector and I can assure you that it does go on to a considerable degree and if there's one certainty that I do know it's that elected at any level are not advised or consulted beforehand or during.

Edited December 8, 2023 by Non-Believer
Fat fingers

[Beelzebub3]

7 minutes ago, Gladys said:

Indeed, 'outsourcing' as it was known, creating huge private firms devoted to doing what the public sector used to do for itself. 

Outsourcing only works if it is managed correctly if not  you have a Douglas promenade/Liverpool landing stage /NSC flume etc. I am sure there is a lot more government projects that have been poorly managed. I have yet to hear any MHK ask what action will be taken to ensure this mis-management does not re-occur in the future all I hear is "lesson's have been learned" clearly they have not and its business as usual.