Posts by Eddie Clark
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The rich/wealthy are the embodiment of Satan?
...Is that tongue in cheek, an exaggeration, or are you serious?
If you're serious. Um. Wow. That's an interesting statement.
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I suspect I was being too opaque.
I am a fervent champion of accountability and transparancy. My fear is that the Public Sector gets manipulated by various interests to become less open despite legislation such as the OIA.
For the avoidance of doubt, I want to be able to publish more evidence based material. I can't, because, for apparently political reasons we are (as public servants) prohibited from direct contact with the public.
We are required to communicate through rooms full of people who tailor our words.
Fair enough, glad I misinterpreted (though in my defence the majority of commenters appear to have read it the same way I did).
Your further explanation makes me think I entirely agree with you! If that's the way your department requires information requests to be handled, I think that is perverse. Almost all my OIA requests have had direct contact with the policy people concerned. If I was asking for controversial stuff, it got vetted by their legal department, but the redactions never seemed unreasonable. I DO agree its poor if you're required to shovel all outside communication, including OIA requests, through a Comms department.
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Stuart, there are various models - ranging from design/build/operate (i.e. a private company builds, owns, and runs a prison and is then contracted by the government to house prisoners) to the tendering out of catering services / cleaning etc. Key is mooting something in the middle - private companies managing (i.e. running, including guards) existing publicly built prisons.
These management contracts will probably be put out to tender, with a list of service requirements attached to the tender document. The provider that provides a low price, (or a combination of low price and good quality assurance, depending on the tender model) will win the contract and start managing the prison. So that's how price is determined. The service standards will depend on what's in the contract, which will presumably be drafted by corrections. This could include rehabilitation and prisoner care standards, as well as things like security and maintenance. The problems here are threefold:
1) Its really hard for anyone to monitor a goal as ephemeral as rehabilitation. How would you make sure they're genuinely following best, accepted practice in attempting to rehabilitate prisoners?
2) As was mentioned above, citing NotPC, corrections has been pilloried as incompetent to manage prisons, yet the same people expect it to draft sensible contracts that ensure prisons are run properly and then monitor compliance properly.
3) Even if we assume proper monitoring etc, it still looks very much like the government attempting to contract out of its own obligations (e.g. human rights, official information).
Basically, privatising prisons is a lot more complicated, in principle and in practice, that privatising, say, an SOE.
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Stephen:
See! The devil is in the details. And the more detailed the contract / incentives are, the more expensive compliance and monitoring is Monitoring costs are never properly accounted for in outsourcing, and they can seriously cut into expected savings. Which either means very few savings, or improperly monitored prisons.
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Stephen:
This becomes the problem - the tension between the cost savings achievable through privatization and the public policy goals we think it's important to achieve. The system you suggest is theoretically possible, though I don't think it's been tried. However, I suspect it would require a massively expensive monitoring effort which would significantly eat into any cost savings that privatisation achieved. That being the case, why bother privatising?
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But unfortunately, you will get various media titans demanding an assurance that this will never happen again...
I believe Paul Henry, word for word, asked for that on Close Up last week in relation to some public sector scandal du jour.
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Russell:
Fair enough, and I take the point. I was somewhat intemperate. Largely because Public Service Manager essentially blamed a large proportion of government problems on lawyers. I'm a lawyer who's worked both with and on the other side of a number of very professional, dedicated public service lawyers, and I found it a bit upsetting to have the entire group dismissed to readily. ?, I apologise (but still think you're wrong on the narrow point of the worth of lawyer - although I would, wouldn't I?).
On the substance of the topic, I agree it does chill somewhat, but what are the alternatives? Do we want to go back to the old official secrets act days? I agree that openness does have a cost, but as an overarching value, I think it is worth it.
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On a semi-related note, does the specter of private prisons mildly worry anyone else? I'm filing them in my "what could possibly go wrong" basket.
Yes that's right, nothing to see here, move along!
More seriously, last year for a variety of reasons (doing an LLM the principal one) I read a fair bit of academic literature on private prisons. They DO tend to reduce costs, but at the expense of prisoner welfare and conditions. These two, on average, were observed to be reduced only slightly. More importantly, though, there was an observed decrease in the effectiveness of rehabilitation programmes - the private prisons have a perverse incentive to encourage recidivism, because recidivism increases the number of 'clients'. And that isn't even going in to the problems in principle of the state contracting out of the responsibilities that go hand in hand with a monopoly on punishment/incarcertation.
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So let me get this straight. The problem with the public sector is it has too many lawyers, and its procurement processes are audited? Are you serious?
In particular, your interpretation of the OIA is deeply worrying, if its a common attitude within the public service. Having been both on the side of making OIA requests (both personally and on behalf of others) and also vetting information for release on the government side, I would strongly disagree. Complaints to the Ombudsmen about OIA responses usually arise when departments say "there are no documents on this" or "no you can't have any of them". Redactions of confidential/sensitive information within documents, it seems to me, have relatively broad acceptance.
Also, with isolated excpetions, I've had very good experiences with officials when making OIA requests. They're usually pleasant, helpful, and respond with the information you want (to the extent that it can be released) as soon as they can. Sometimes this takes a while but, hey, that's fine. Given what you've said, your department may be one of those isolated exceptions. If you can't see that the public has an interest in what the government is thinking and why it makes its decisions, then I'm rather worried that you work in the public service.
Government should be allowed to govern, by all means, but it needs to keep in mind who it is governing for - i.e. the public as a whole, from individuals to companies to nonprofits to unions. All of those have a right to expect that information will be disclosed where possible, and that money will be able to be accounted for.
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"The participants?" All of them? Andrew Little to Stephen Tindall to Charles Finny all have the same worldview? And EVERY business owner that was invited subscribes to neoliberal economics?
You've proved my point rather nicely, I/S.
And I don't think its worth engaging any further, cos you're sure as hell not going to change your mind due to what I say. An apology for questioning my intellectual integrity would be nice, but I don't really expect that.