Consumer reviews vital in commissioning public service delivery

 

When I read this New York Times article opening paragraph

 LONDON — Inside a dormitory now known by students as H.M.P., for Her Majesty’s Prison, trash piled up in shared kitchens. Students washed their clothes in bathroom sinks. Security guards stalked the gates, keeping anyone from leaving or entering.

just now, my memory flashed back to a Wembley Matters blog post by Martin Francis from four years ago, when I was still a Londoner and Web Logging and commenting on behalf of Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group in the Internet guise of 'Dude Swheatie of Kwug':

Tuesday, 25 October 2016

Awards Panel blasts private student accommodation providers

Unite student accommodation, Olympic Way LINK

As another student accommodation block opens on Olympic Way. Wembley, readers may be interested  in the decision of a panel deciding on an Award for Student Accommodation, sponsored by Property Week.

There were due to be more than 2,500 student units around Wembley Stadium whenI last checked.

The Panel refused to nominate a winner and wrote the following to the organisers:

Awarding panel concluded: "Unless all students have access
to safe, affordable accommodation, at every institution
and the means to pay for it, there is no cause for celebration,
nor the ability for us to award a for-profit sector
failing so many of our peers."

 

I commented then at the foot of that Wembley Matters blog post:

Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group said...

Brilliant! I would say that the panel concerned were really well-educated, as evidenced by their response!

Would the Department for Work & Pensions [DWP], or, say, the 'Employment Related Services Association' venture so bold as to launch a user-led nominations award?

Perhaps if the DWP launched such an award, their way of engaging the panel's co-operation would be by fear of benefit sanctions? Centre for Crime & Justice Studies: Benefit sanctions: Britain's secret penal system

Dude Swheatie of Kwug

25 October 2016 at 13:24

 Of course, that was years before Coronavirus began to hit around the globe, but I would argue that all this emphasises the sheer stupidity of basing international economies upon the an ideology that venerates privatising public services, cutting taxation for the wealthy, and treating renters as criminals to be coerced into modern slavery.

UK 'skills gap' and social and economic exclusion — a prospective letter to Hereford Times?

Alan Winstanley ('True figures', Hereford Times printed Letters, November 28) argues that the UK can’t train enough nurses and/or high-tech sector employees. A UK General Election is a great time to ask political parties why they think that might be so, and how they and their party would address that matter if elected to represent us.

I would argue that a root problem is short-termist underfunding by successive UK governments in the training of home grown talent, as I argued on the BBC2 tv programme ‘Working Lunch’ broadcast on September 27, 2000. A Web Design training company worker had told me, “I agree with you: six weeks is inadequate for our training curriculum, but the government has told us to halve the training period from 12 weeks to 6 in order to double the throughput from the dole queue.”

The Centre for Economic & Social Inclusion argued on the same programme slot that there was considerable underinvestment in training to promote absolutely basic literacy skills. Four years later while volunteering in teaching [other] adults with learning difficulties very basic computing skills, I was commended for “endless patience with slower learners.”

Yet there was no paid future in that for me, as Learning & Skills Council prioritsed  NVQ Levels 2 and 3 — with no extra investment overall — so as to implement the London 2012 Olympics agenda. I, and the trainees I supported, and their Guardian/Channel4 Teacher of the Year Award Winning paid teacher, were let down yet again! (“Learning & Skills Council [existed] to help make England better skilled and more competitive.”(1))

It’s also been pointed out that our nurses are trained at their own expense,(2) and many rely on food banks (3) and Universal Credit top up. (4)

Basically, the First Past the Post (FPTP voting system favours the major political parties’ tax-evading funders [as ‘wealth creators’ for those parties] to invest more in their Research & Development. Government underfunding of public services leads to burnout while tech companies such as BT help resource think tank ‘charities’ such as Reform UK toward, say, the ‘digitising of public services’ creating greater social exclusion and extreme poverty as Universal Credit is ‘digital by default’.





Alan Wheatley

(NB: Hereford Times recommends that letters for publication be 250 words or less to stand a chance of publication, but I have had more wordy letters published there. The above text comes to 362 words excluding my byline.)

Notes

1. "The Learning & Skills Council exists to help make England better skilled and more competitive" was the 'description' or Mission Statement proclaimed on their former website.
2. uk nurses trained at own expense
3. uk nurses food banks
4. uk nurses "universal credit"

Prof Guy Standing expounds upon 'plunder of the commons'

Guy Standing says:

“The commons have been eroded by neglect, in recent times accelerated by budget cuts due to austerity... Often, the erosion has resulted from the deliberate neglect, part of the strategy adopted by the early Thatcherites in which services and industries were starved of investment in order to induce public indifference to, and support for, their privatisation.”

More at http://camdennewjournal.com/article/common-sense

See also 
https://newsforwardsfromalanwheatley.blogspot.com/2019/11/government-policy-and-global-investment-as-plunder-of-the-Commons.html

and

https://newsforwardsfromalanwheatley.blogspot.com/2019/10/government-and-fiona-bruce-backing-for-mipim-uk-summit-2019.html