Hardly a debate when you post links from the Guardian and earlier the Mirror...what's next? The Socialist Worker?
There are layers of 'Government' and obviously, because Labour want to be in power, they concentrate of blaming the upper echelons of power for absolutely everything but I offer a different view point hard earned from personal experience.
I'm not going to say who I was working for but I was reasonably far up the greasy pole there but still had to follow rules put in place by public finances despite working for a large manufacturer. There is a level of government and a group of workers who don't change out after a GE...these are civil servants. So when I needed to buy something for one of my projects (let's say an Item of IT like a blade server for example) I had to use public money to do that (defence project funded by tax payers money...as were my wages etc). I had to follow the process put in place by my Public Finance Officer (who spent a deal of time on site with us...mainly shouting at people and getting 'ansty') to make this purchase.
This involved a number of stages...1. Fill out quite lengthy form explaining what I was trying to achieve and what I needed to buy. 2. Once that was approved go out to quotation for the item from an approved supplier...often up to three of them. 3. Attach the reasoning, its approval and the quote to a cover sheet and send it in snail mail to the first name on the list for approval and the list was long.
Most if not all tech quotes have a validity...and for IT items the prices change quickly. Mine were always 30 days validity but the bundle of paperwork I needed to make the purchase regularly took longer than 30 days on its journey around various departments, many of them involving the Civil Service. When I finally got them back I would see that the quote had run out so quickly ask for another. The price 70% of the time had changed which invalidated the cover sheet so I had to do it all over again. We called it the procurement death spiral. The longest one of these went on for was nearly 6 moths before I got one back in under 30 days...meanwhile a project had stalled and its team sat around or worse, assigned to another job and lost forever in some cases.
I wonder if this bares resemblance to what is happening now in PPE procurement? I found that most of my CS's weren't of a high enough grade to change any of it and weren't prepared to stick their head above the parapet to criticise it too much (if they wanted that next assignment or promotion). 'Government' procurement has long been an issue in this country under Labour or Tory...and this is where, perhaps, some of the issues lay?
