Sounds great to me. Name five. Also be prepared to discuss before the next general election if any of those five policies Labour were undone and how many billions were saved.
Well gee. There’s 1) all the examples of people getting rich off the asylum system I already listed above, and that’s before we get into 2) the profligate spending on the Rwanda policy that you handwaved away earlier in the thread (as if £700m - or £10bn - are meaningless figures). There’s 3) the enormous number of private companies currently profiting heavily off the NHS, which have increased costs and greatly worsened outcomes. There’s the 4) practice of awarding government contracts without competitive tender to party donors.
I mean, 5) Sunak as Chancellor literally wrote off billions in fraud, much of which seems to have been perpetuated by Tory donors. But who knows - maybe the British public will rise up at the next election and demand a return to rampant corruption and fraud as you appear to think they will.
Could you explain why? My understanding is that the rail companies only run a term limited franchise. As and when those franchises expire they will become part of Great British Railways by default. No compensation will need to be paid to the operating companies to buy back the franchises. The operating companies don’t own anything apart from the staff uniforms. The rolling stock are all leased and even the sandwiches in the buffet car belong to a 3rd party catering company. Staff will TUPE across to the new company the same as they already have when franchises have changed hands.
The subsidies that are currently being paid to the operating companies can then go to fund GBR without the need for dividend payments and profits. How would that cost more money? And that’s before you start with potential efficiency savings from having one single train company.
Rail privatisation has always been a con. There was no effective competition between companies to drive down prices. The cost of subsidies has risen year on year, with the operating companies providing very little in return. New trains have been provided by the leasing companies, which in theory is due to investment by the rail companies. But that is just government money, in the form of subsidies less profit.
Isn’t it considered to be something Not Done, for a member of Parliament to vote against their party on anything? Unless the party leadership specifically “frees the members to vote their own conscience” on a particular vote, which wasn’t done here. Granted, there are different degrees of severity, but wouldn’t some level of disciplinary action be expected for any such vote?
The discipline has already been imposed, by releasing them from the whip.
That’s the most serious discipline that could be imposed.
One of the fun bits is that when the party leadership sends out instructions to vote, how much trouble you are in if you don’t vote the “right way” depends on whether the instruction was underlined one, two, or three times.
Right, but @Wrenching_Spanners ’ point, as I understand it, was that the party could have interpreted this as a major offense (voting against the King’s Speech) or as a minor offense (only voting against the child cap specifically), and only chose to consider it a major offense because they could afford to, with the size of their majority. My point was that, even if they had considered it a minor offense, there still would have been some disciplinary action, even if less severe.
Addressing each of your points:
What are you proposing Labour is going to do with asylum seekers? Find them cheaper hotel rooms? They can’t put them onto barges with rooms - they’ve already canceled that policy. Put them into old military barracks? That’s already been rejected. The only cost saving policy Labour can implement in regards to asylum seekers is “Welcome to the UK - You’re on your own!”
I’m not sure that the Rwanda policy was funding wealthy Tory donors, but you only said “wealthy people” so I’ll give you that one. Cancelling the future exporting of asylum seekers will undoubtedly save money. I dispute that it will save £10 billion despite Yvette Cooper’s claims. The cancellation of the Rwanda policy will also reduce the deterrent effect of that policy for asylum seekers. So while cancelling the policy will have savings, there will be corresponding increased costs from increased asylum seekers. I’m also guessing that a fair amount of the UK asylum seekers who went to Ireland to avoid getting sent to Rwanda will probably be returning.
NHS outsourcing is a huge subject, but it’s ultimately a money saver. Cleaning, catering, facilities maintenance and diagnostic tests are all examples of NHS services that have been privatised because they can be provided more cheaply from the private sector than the public sector. Don’t look for Starmer’s government to bring any of those back into the public sector.
Regarding government contract awarded to Tory donors, from your article:
There is no suggestion that the individuals or companies named have broken the law or committed any wrongdoing.
Also, if the Labour government wants to limit the influence of party donors, I’m absolutely in favour of it as long as it applies to labour union donors.
The fraud you’re talking about is most likely a sunk cost. Unless Reeves is claw back some of the money spent on PPE, that’s not going to help future revenue.
So basically, the billions you think can be saved by “by undoing a lot of the Tory policies instituted solely for the purpose of funnelling taxpayer money to wealthy people” is a pipe dream.
I look forward to Rachel Reeves proving me wrong.
Cite? Because in the end it’s only “cheaper” because the provision is much worse. We saw the same thing under the Thatcher/Major government - profits to Tory donors accompanied by a material deterioration in service (and an MRSA outbreak).
The pipe dream is the insistence that “running costs plus massive private profits” is cheaper than “running costs”, as the earlier discussion about trains already covered.
You can get some efficiencies from having one company who specializes in something like running cafeterias, who runs cafeterias for hospitals and schools and businesses and so on, instead of having one company that runs a medical facility and also a cafeteria. But it might or might not be enough efficiency to justify high profits for that cafeteria company.
Switching from one corporate owner to another corporate owner is a huge effort. I’m not going to pretend that I have any idea what’s involved for railways. Or, for that matter, government acquisitions of private businesses. But for private sector acquisitions, and the integration efforts involved, I’ve got a fair amount of experience.
The big thing you have to resolve right away is cash. After the takeover, who owns the bank accounts? Next is suppliers. The acquiring company is assuming all of the liabilities of the took-over company. Those suppliers need to be paid. After that, ignoring a lot of distractions, operations can continue until it’s time to report the quarterly results. I suppose that will be different for a government entity, but from the times I’ve worked with government bodies, the reporting requirements were much higher, even if they didn’t follow a quarterly schedule. Doing all that switching around requires a lot of effort and usually involves paying an outside party for that effort.
Your proposed efficiency savings will either involve streamlining the inwards supply chain and putting pressure on suppliers to reduce cost, or reducing redundant personnel. Neither of those are tasks public bodies are usually good at.
As far as the prospect that profits and dividends will switch from external parties to the government, a lot of the rail companies have been losing money. The UK government isn’t going to be able to write off those losses unless the rail companies go insolvent first. And for the rail companies that are profitable, you’re presuming that the government will leave them alone while intervening with the unprofitable rail companies. Good luck with that.
Cleaning services in most NHS hospitals are outsourced to a service provider such as Serco.
https://www.serco.com/uk/careers/health-soft-services
Serco has an interest in keeping costs down because that’s how they maintain a profit. They also have an interest in delivering a level of service because it’s specified in their service contracts. Whether they achieve that level of service is questionable. But it’s the same NHS ward managers who are supervising the outsourced Serco employees who would be supervising in-house employees. The NHS managers probably have more ability to reject poor performing outsourced workers than in-house workers. If Serco didn’t fire a poor performing worker, they’d have to leave them unassigned, while replacing them. The NHS would just have to suck it up with a poor performing in-house worker unless the manager wanted to go through a boatload of paperwork to have the underperforming worker fired.
Bringing it back to the thread topic, don’t expect this to change under the Stamer goverment,
You’re still viewing it as a corporate takeover when it’s just a franchise coming to an end. Most of your concerns will already be provided for as part of the franchise contract.
There may be a few extra wrinkles, but several franchises have already ended and either been taken over by another operating company, or defaulted to government control.
Which train companies have made a loss? And are they real losses? Or have the board still managed to find money for their salaries and bonuses?
That’s the theory. The reality is that corners are cut in every way possible, because the effort required to replace a company doing a substandard job is far greater than just putting up with the shitty job they’re doing.
Which is how you get MRSA outbreaks and all sorts of other abuses by private contractors. It places a surprisingly substantial barrier to accountability, as we’ve seen over and over and over again.
It’s also the case that the penalty clauses for missing targets are usually woeful. It’s often cheaper to pay the fine than throw more bodies at a problem to get back on target.
That was certainly true of a lot of the train franchise contracts.
And definitely the case for our outsourced bin collections. The fines for missing collections were about half the cost of paying overtime etc to catch up. So we had overflowing bins for weeks.
New Labour were a bit better at this than the conservatives. I worked on a few ‘building schools for the future’ projects and the contracts did have teeth. Which was highly amusing when the company got rid of me after I delivered 3 on time and on budget. The next one was 2 weeks late with a £20k per day penalty clause. Just because I made it look easy, doesn’t mean it really was easy!
Oops. The Tory leadership contest begins in much the same accident-prone way as they lost the election
Love it! 
Did the British Tories not take note of the laughter that greeted the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party, some 20 years ago?