I'm so sad...
Now if only Capita could disappear without trace and their CL1 contracts with them. Getting some info on how that deal came into being the first place would also be welcome.
Capita chief Andy Parker is stepping off the executive merry-go-round after the little loved outsourcing company today reported financial results that showed a crash in profits - the worst in its corporate history. The London-listed business told the City that costs related to contract delays and weak trade in the technology …
put the UK government in a very tricky position with the Israeli government the other month. You know how Capita got the job of chasing up the TV licenses for the BBC? And you know how they wrote to all the addresses without licenses or where they suspected more licenses were needed due to size of property and everything? Well there was that letter they sent to the Israeli embassy addressed to "The Occupier(s)"...
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If so, the tears have not stopped running down my face. Worst company ever to work for, and I worked at BT in the 90's which is a pretty good benchmark of how not to run a company.
Trouble is that they are going to get all those IR35 contractors coming to them from the MoD, let alone the fact that they are probably going to get a lot of contracts back from Steria after the "Test results? What test results?' fiasco.
If you run a diverse range of businesses with a one size fits all approach, what's the betting that all of them are almost equally badly run? If you take the average of all the points on a circle, you get the centre. Which is not a point on the circle.
Clearly you are a youngster, otherwise you'd know this is the SOP of western capitalism.
1) Start a business. Do well, become successful
2) Acquire other business you believe are related to your core business (1)
3) Go to (2). Rinse and repeat until
4) you "discover" that trying to align several differing business models, cycles and markets costs you more as a conglomerate than it would if the business units were discrete so:
5) Divest yourself of the superfluous business to concentrate on your "core business"
6) Goto 1
This is all the better if it can be achieved with tankerloads of taxpayers money ...(see Rolls Royce, GEC, British Aerospace, British Leyland, British Telecom ....)
"Clearly you are a youngster, otherwise you'd know this is the SOP of western capitalism."
You must be a bit of youngster yourself, James, because you say:
"1) Start a business. Do well, become successful"
That's not how capitalism works in the UK. It works like this.
1) Have a burning desire to get rich quick.
2) Realise that it takes too long to build a business.
3) Head to Westminster with some cash in pocket and take a few MPs out to lunch/dinner/Bubblegum Rhinos/Stringpersons/whatever.
4) With their support under your belt, lobby for "a moribund government agency" to be improved by transfer into the private sector, for peppercorn payment to "preserve vital jobs".
5) Sign a golden handshake deal to let the new private company operate for a decade without "unfair" competition.
6) Strip the assets, borrow billions, saddle the new company with debt.
7) Siphon the borrowed cash to your web of shell companies across the Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Caribbean, Ireland, the Seychelles and the Netherlands. Put most of it into your own anonymous accounts.
8) Invest the company pension fund in one of your shell companies.
9) Transfer the pension fund to your web of shell companies.
10) Declare massive loss, sack the employees, close the business.
11) Retire to your secret Caribbean hideaway.
Had to reply to this...
Serco are truly terrible. My employer has a branch office that has 6 or so desktop boxes in the entire (small) building that Field, 1st and 2nd look after (sometimes). The rest are their responsibility. God only knows why...
I had a call from a Serco field drone asking where one of their computers was because they couldn't find it. To which I replied 'I don't know they're your computers'. He hung up.
The point being they're not part of my employers estate. That's the point. How would I know? Literally.
They're running too many different businesses in my view. Too many small acquisitions which won't ever amount to much. The latest profit warnings, write-downs and so on, the big fall in the share price over a year or so, forthcoming loss of their CEO, the company due to be taken out of the FTSE-100 index of the biggest UK companies and various other negative stories in the media recently just make it look like the remaining management there is struggling. More changes are needed, a really big overhaul of how they are run and who does the running.
My wife was given a date for a PIP home assessment a couple of weeks ago.
Come the date and time, and (for some reason unsurprisingly) no show.
An hour after the allotted time, I called the PIP helpline, and was told that the appointment had been cancelled, and that their systems showed my wife had been called *and* texted 3 days previously. I queried this and was told "the systems right"
At the same time my wife was taking a call - from the same department - apologising for cancelling the appointment and confirming that there had been no communication with her. She queried this and was told "the systems right".
If only we had recordings of those conversations ... oh - we do. Thank you asterisk !!!
I'll laugh out loud here, as someone who worked on TAFMIS, the predecessor of RPP. Capita, it seems, have been permitted to do things (such as offshore) that were not permitted for previous systems and *still* can't nail a system together. Coming next, no doubt, will be Capita's EDS moment when hundreds of thousands of recruiting records go missing.
My crap Crapita story is the TVL one, and frightening my elderly MiL with the usual nastygrams, even though she had a licence, and free to boot because of her age. Turns out they had no way of dealing with alias addresses, where the account address in their database is not quite the same as the Postcode Address File one. Got her MP involved but no satisfactory resolution:(