Local council doing private/contracting work

[Marc]

They don't have to be competitive they can underprice every job they look at and pass on the loss to the tax payer!

 

I have experienced this first hand.. Arb Manager/ Tree officer (yes he had two roles) prices a job to take 5 hours.. it takes 10 hours!

 

Said manager then tells us to only book 5 hours as private work and book the rest as council hours!

 

Said manager then gets high fives from senior management for delivering on the private work but nobody is the wiser because nobody is monitoring the council work.

 

Maybe in some areas, I'm not to sure round here I had seen one price and felt it was spot on cost wise, not that I am going to give away figures here but let's say it's priced at £800, then subbed out to a 2 man team who accept £400 the council make £400.

 

I don't have an issue with that other than I think it's exploiting the sub contractor who doesn't know any better.

 

From my understanding the goal of the local council I am talking about is to become totally self sufficient where in they are less reliant on tax payers money which in theory seems a good idea.

 

Problem is the incentive is not there if you pay your estimators twice as much as your lead climbers which you expect to work to a high standard and compete with the best in the area and earn little more than the person doing the council tree watering contract is not going to happen as the good climbers will chase the best rates and rightly so.

[richy_B]

I have worked for both councils that do and don't do private work. In theory it's a no brainier for the councils as they already have the kit and the infrastructure.

 

In practice less emphasis is put on the council trees and more on building the private client base. With a lot of creative accounting to make sure the private work looks good on the accounts.

 

This being said the money then goes back into the council which can't be a bad thing.

So fraud then. 'Creative accounting' or altering of accounts to reflect anything other than the truth is a criminal offences and would be dealt with by the serious fraud office. In this case public funds are being used to benefit private individuals. Private individuals quoted for/chosen by the council officers.

 

This falls foul of a significant number of laws and would never stand up to public scrutiny.

[Macaulay]

So fraud then. 'Creative accounting' or altering of accounts to reflect anything other than the truth is a criminal offences and would be dealt with by the serious fraud office. In this case public funds are being used to benefit private individuals. Private individuals quoted for/chosen by the council officers.

 

This falls foul of a significant number of laws and would never stand up to public scrutiny.

 

 

I agree with you.

[Steve Bullman]

Did you ever do anything about this yet?

 

 

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