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On 30 November 2011 13:00, Paul Bromley <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > ... The crazy situation that my PM tells me we are being > 'compelled' to do is to let another contractor take on this work who then > has to contract it to us. No doubt they would take a cut anyway and we would > have even less. I would be willing to believe that there is an explanation for an arrangement as described which does not require any criminal activity - payments or the expectation of employment by the company or organisation that is getting the top contract there, but only after I'd seen a careful description of it, and subject to later revision depending on employmen patterns in the following years. There can of course be perfectly proper reasons for people to leave a public service purchasing organisation and go to work in a company they have previously dealt with - they have particular knowledge of it and the affections they form in the previous working relationship may be a sound foundation for an effective team. But it is rightly scrutinised. Clearly for instance the movements between Wall Street and the US Federal government have been an essential part of both for many years, and career paths for NHS IT senior people which loop in and out of Microsoft enrich both. Both organisations one should be certain to say. I have some sympathy for both PCTs as senescent crumbling organisations whose essential core try to accomplish their imposed and assumed tasks with fewer staff, and for the remaining staff, those who for whatever reasons have not found a lifeboat. Clearly one expects the least competent and useful ones would have been shed earliest and it would be unkind to state the arithmetic indicates a reduced average competence in the remainder. But I suspect the wastage is going to start looking like Northern Rock and other major crashes if it isn't already, with rising long-term sickleave and ill-health retirement applications. An alarming feature of that is that the people least likely to become ill from worry at their post are exactly those who are neither engaged nor bothered about it, and those are the ones I'd least like to hire away from a PCT if I were running a company or recruiting to some $_AnteLegendaryNeologism commissioning group. The last one out therefore may not turn out the lights, not so much from the conscious decision that it is not his electricity bill, as from not having that in the job description. Weather in Queensland: Excellent. Public mood in Queensland: excellent. Government in Queensland: regarded as excessive, noticeably smaller and less complex than UK. $_AnteLegendaryNeologism Need a word, can't think of one: A legend is half history and half fantasy. What would the equivalent for the future be? -- Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/