Let’s be honest here, they’re just incompetent from the top down.
It should be ran like a business and it’d get things done a lot better rather than wasting money left right and centre.
i heard stupid **** that happens all the time with my local council - know people who work there and people who work for companies who do their work.
Its similar to getting a plumber in to do painting and a painter to do the plumbing.
You think this hasn't been tried?
Heh. Of course it's been tried. And so has outsourcing and
everything else you can think of in under 5 seconds, because you think it's so obvious.
It's all been done. Most of it badly because it doesn't work!
Providing public services is not and should not be a profit-making enterprise. Private companies running services just look for ways to provide (less than) the absolute minimum for the absolute maximum (pee taking) they can get away with. They don't care if your roads are full of potholes or your street lighting doesn't work or anything else you might care about (as a resident or a user of a council service). They will just seek to maximise returns and if you don't like it, too bad!
Using for-profit business models in the public sector doesn't automatically increase efficiency either. Instead you can end up with all sorts of stupidity, like depts. billing themselves for all work done by their own staff; prioritising non-essential work that can be billed at a higher rate than other work (etc). That way madness can also lie.
And as for outsourcing.. find me a council that hasn't tried to outsource just about everything at *least* once already. And then had to take whatever it was back in house some years later, when the outsourcing a) ended up costing more and b) provided a worse (or completely failed) service.
Listen, I *know* you all hate the councils and think we are the laziest, most useless, most expensive workers in this country. So it's crazy when people come in and actually *try* all this "transformational" nonsense that I mentioned; it's funny when all too often it fails to deliver any improvement. Or things plain get worse.
Probably many of you have such a low opinion because you don't have experience of the public sector; you just hate the "wastefulness" because of some anecdote somebody told you about. As @Angillion already said, show me the country where private sector businesses never have inefficiencies or incompetence. That's just humans doing humans.
In general, councils are pretty damn good at what they do, and the people who work there are trying - in very difficult conditions now with all the funding cuts - to provide services to a (generally) ungrateful public. You're welcome.
