My wife who works in a school told me today that her PC has “blown up”. I asked if her windows were ok, but she looked at me blankly. The engineer was called and he says it needs a new motherboard.

I thought, new motherboard, £150 ish plus fitting. Say £300 (yes I know you could buy an entire new base unit for that, but firms have their costs and need to make some profit).

The actual cost however is going to be £1500!! What a total ripoff! The school has no choice, it has a contractual agreement with the maintenance firm and cannot seek alternative quotes (according to my missus).

Either she is having the wool pulled over her eyes, or the school is being forced by the county council to accept an incredibly over priced service. The school have no say in the matter, but the money comes from their budget for which they are responsible, not the council. How thoroughly unreasonable is that?

This isn’t the first time I have heard about overcharging for work done in the school. The “numpty” council will only use preferred contractors who must have met certain criteria to get “on the list”, but once these suppliers have preferred status, they can charge what they like. It is not often that the school and it’s governors get an opportunity to negotiate. Once on these preferred suppliers list, the council then sign off whatever the sums demanded willy nilly, presumably because they feel that it is essential to get a service from a company that has all the “correct” accreditations. This approach is appropriate in certain circumstances, but why don’t they build into these contracts some checks and balances? Things like fixed costs etc etc.

I think there is something going wrong in these council workers’ heads! I know one such person who, rather than get a few double glazing firms round to get some estimates for her proposed front porch, said she would have to get an architect to manage the process so that the job was done properly! WTF for a flat roofed plastic porch? Imagine how much more expensive that would be! How dumb! “horses for courses”!?

No wonder why nothing ever gets done by councils without vast sums of money being wasted.

I think these public sector people need a commercial rocket up the…… 😆

Do they teach IT at her school?

Buy a new mother board with school funds and then have the IT teacher instruct the students on the workings of a computer with a hands on lesson.

Lesson 1) How to strip a computer down for cleaning.
Lesson 2) How to rebuild it.

it’s the same with the NHS – all the maintenance work is contracted out to private firms, meaning that changing a lightbulb or similar is charged at the firm’s hourly rate so £30 a time. they’re not allowed to have lightbulbs and to change them themselves cos of H&S regs.

Oh, if only IT managers ruled the world, think what a wonderful place it would be then.

I think you’ll find that frameworks are used now because all the DLOs have been outsourced to make initial savings and the remaining commissioning staff generally don’t have the knowledge base or experience to be able to manage jobs so everything is out-sourced and the risk is pushed out with it with an attendant increase in cost.

You are approaching this as though it is a symptom of dysfunction in the public services. I’m seriously not convinced that’s the case. Rather, the entire relationship between the state and the private sector is an enormous money-go-round in which public money is disbursed to private firms to keep them profitable so they can keep paying people who pay more tax which can be used to buy yet more commercial services at inflated prices. I’m not an economist, but the system shows signs of being designed that way. 🙂

do you understand the workings of public finance.
do you realise the short term statistical benefits of contracting out services, in relation to resource costs

the contract will have been brought in by underqualified contracts staff following close engagement with a contracted out management consultant, who was trained on public money and now commands a salary far in excess of the civil servant post they abandonded.

if you think mp’s like to feather their nests, you should have a think about who taught them to do it – they sure aint clever enough to do it on their own

I’m not an economist

That’s quite clear from the way you’ve got down to the nitty gritty of the situation in 5 lines without using any big words.

My sister in law works alongside a public/private ‘onsite’ consultant who earns almost 3 times her salary- he asks her what to do and when he has a presentation to the council she has to work on his presentation for him. He actually ASKS HER FOR THE ANSWERS.

Now- she cant say anything to people higher up as its political.

Honestly.

That’s quite clear from the way you’ve got down to the nitty gritty of the situation in 5 lines without using any big words.

That’s quite impressive for a lawyer, no?