Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
Setting aside the poke at Francis, that is a classic.
...Crucial information, recorded on different systems by various authorities, was "lost" in handovers between staff, Mr Russell added...
...This is a report that cannot be allowed to gather dust...
...A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "These were horrendous crimes and we have apologised to the victims for the unacceptable failings in this case. "We have greatly improved information sharing between prisons and probation officers and all probation staff have received new, mandatory training on when offenders should be recalled." The second part of the review is due to be published in the autumn...
Half a decade on, what has changed ?
The Government has changed and the press wasn't to humiliate the current government whilst the press didn't want to humiliate the previous government?
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
This. Very much this. What is the point in raising more taxes to throw onto the bonfire?
We can't afford the faux-market structures inside the NHS and Education. Waste, duplication, inefficiency and a system that despite all that still doesn't have the capacity to offer market choice. Scrap it all. We can't afford the cost of cleaning up the mess from cuts. The taxis you mention are what happens when government dumps responsibility on councils but doesn't fund it. Taxis should be an emergency measure but ends up the default because there isn't any money to put alternatives in place.
And I could go on. We need significant reform of the way we do services - cutting the structure and the spending to improve the provision.
I have to ask - what the hell is government spending our money on? They stopped funding so many things - universities, councils, adult social care etc - yet we have record taxes and enormous debt.
Your argument seems to be, "if we just spent a bit more".
Sadly it's true, very often investing extra up front could save lots over time.
That muddle headed thinking was there at the birth of the NHS and the welfare state. If we spend more now, it will reduce in future. It is not true, if you spend more now, you just end up spending even more in the future.
I have handled many a local authority budget, its remarkable how little you get for what you spend, without hard headed budget controls you end up with bloated costs and poor service.
Interesting. I've never had responsibility for large budgets. My experience is of domestic matters, such as doing a proper roof repair rather than just patching a leak.
Yes. I agree doing things on the cheap isnt the solution in many cases, invoke (though not entirely correctly) the theory on boots. Just spending more on something does not equate to improvement, it can in some cases dramatically reduce productivity. The public sector is exceptionally vulnerable to this because it can be difficult to quantify what is a beneficial outcome. The private sector is not immune to it, but they do at the end of the day have a bottom line and can self correct. The self correction in the public sector is harder because you can defy there is a problem longer.
So, 700 cops 6 arrests. Public sector productivity hits a new low.
This is at the core of when all the political talking heads are going I have looked at the data the trend of this or that crime stat is down, why the public go WTF....everybody understands crimes happen, what they don't expect is that a) the police just go nought we can do and b) when they do actually investigate they never catch anybody for certain types of crimes.
For things like your car been nicked its now here is your crime number for the insurance and jog on. For what could be a crime of stealing £50-100k item. Its not nicking a mar bars from the corner shop.
And we had reports that alleged train stabby stabby not only allegedly went stabby stabby the previous day but allegedl slashed somebody in the face the previous week and the plod closed the case within hours. Slashed in the face and the police shrug....
It feels like whataboutery but the case of Allison Pearson's tweet she deleted:
1 A social media post by Allison Pearson in 2023 was initially reported to the Metropolitan Police as a potential breach of the Malicious Communications Act in November 2024.
2 The case was then passed to Sussex Police, who marked it as a possible non-crime hate incident (NCHI) and potential malicious communication.
3 Sussex Police passed the complaint further to Essex Police, where Allison Pearson resides.
4 Essex Police made two assessments and then opened an investigation under section 17 of the Public Order Act 1986 related to material "likely or intended to cause racial hatred."
5 Essex Police sent officers to visit Pearson's home on Remembrance Sunday 2024 to discuss the alleged incident, describing it during the visit as a "non-crime hate incident," although the force later contested that characterization.
6 Several police forces including the Metropolitan Police and Sussex Police were involved at different stages before Essex Police took primary responsibility.
7 Essex Police set up a "gold group," usually reserved for major crimes, to handle the investigation of Pearson’s social media post, which escalated the seriousness of the inquiry.
8 Essex Police made an Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) complaint against The Telegraph’s reporting of the incident.
Surely as soon as it was assessed as "non-crime" the involvement of police should stop.
Or at most, passed straight to Essex Police (where she lives) and a couple of cops gone round to offer "words of advice" ie what a traffic cop does if he thinks you are driving like a dick but haven't reached a prosecutable threshold.
It's a fine line between "we've come to check your thinking" (Harry Millar), in what they are actually doing is fishing for Mens Rea to see if they can get a juicy hate crime, and "just want to chat about how close what you said was to breaching the law, we are here not because we want to stop you saying or doing what you currently are, but just some advice about when it might go over the line".
I think both are unacceptable to me personally and would involve a polite FO, but others might find it helpful, if it is a genuine conversation and not an attempt to trip up. Even saying that the discussion is not under caution (is that possible under PACE, to have a conversation not under caution, to prevent future crime?).
Sadly, you need to watch what you say in any interaction with the police force. They are only talking to you to gain evidence as they don't have it yet. If I would have been in that situation I would have told them to go off and catch criminals and shut the door. I suspect that it also benefitted Pearson because it gave her good content for her column.
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
Councils are in a terrible state, some of it cuts, but others by a dramatic increase in costs, obliged on them by the courts moving the line for what they are required to provide. Some costs around children services are extraordinary, there's no cap on looked after children in care costs. A local council to me has a single child in care (one child) costing over £25k a week. A week!!
Like every entitlement, every piece of public spending, they'll be some rationale behind it all. But there needs to be some tough loving going on somewhere.
Let’s say that they require 3 staff members per shift (rare but happens, especially with mentally ill teenagers with violent tendencies). That’s 9 core staff members to provide 24/7 cover. Add in another staff member to account for holiday cover and you will easily be a £400,000 p.a. in staff costs. You’ll also need say 25% of a team coordinator which is around £20k additional.
You will need at least a 3 bedroom property to support them - let’s assume that’s £350,000 of capital cost post adaption which they will rent at a 8% annual rate so probably another £30k per year at least.
So we are at £450k per year before you even start thinking about social charges on staff (probably another £40k per year), any medical interventions or support, education and life enhancement programmes. You could very easily get to £1m per year. You then add a 20% margin on top for the company that is doing all of this work and you easily get to £1.2m - £25k per week.
It's just not sustainable. What would have happened to children in this situation twenty five years ago?
25 years ago? What, in 2000? Pretty much exactly the same.
Not exactly. The service would probably have been run by the local authority; now it's likely a private provider paid by the LA.
I can't find figures for the cost of a child in care back then, but I do know that that cost has nearly doubled in the last five years alone.
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
This. Very much this. What is the point in raising more taxes to throw onto the bonfire?
We can't afford the faux-market structures inside the NHS and Education. Waste, duplication, inefficiency and a system that despite all that still doesn't have the capacity to offer market choice. Scrap it all. We can't afford the cost of cleaning up the mess from cuts. The taxis you mention are what happens when government dumps responsibility on councils but doesn't fund it. Taxis should be an emergency measure but ends up the default because there isn't any money to put alternatives in place.
And I could go on. We need significant reform of the way we do services - cutting the structure and the spending to improve the provision.
I have to ask - what the hell is government spending our money on? They stopped funding so many things - universities, councils, adult social care etc - yet we have record taxes and enormous debt.
Add, procurement, contract management, property management, and property development, where private businesses leech off the public sector, charging over the odds, for providing sub-standard services.
As far back as 1993, I can remember Camden Council were selling off freeholds to commercial tenants on Hampstead High Street and Haverstock Hill, for half the open market value.
Part of the reason for that is public sector won't pay to recruit and develop their own in-house expertise - due to things like salary caps and unions, and recruitment rules - so all the skills sit in the private sector.
The UK construction PMI has shown a historic contraction, with the latest reading in October 2025 at 44.1, marking the tenth consecutive month below the 50-point expansion/contraction threshold. This marks the longest period of continuous decline since the global financial crisis. The sector has been negatively impacted by sluggish demand, a lack of new tender opportunities, and falling employment, with civil engineering activity falling particularly sharply.
Recent performance and key trends
Continuous contraction: The S&P Global UK Construction PMI has been below 50 for ten straight months as of October 2025, indicating a sustained downturn.
Sharpest decline in over five years: The rate of contraction in October 2025 was the sharpest since May 2020.
Weakening demand and new work: Construction firms report poor market conditions and fewer new projects, with civil engineering activity falling at the fastest pace since May 2020 due to a lack of new work to replace completed projects.
Job losses: Employment in the sector has dropped significantly, with the pace of job shedding accelerating to its fastest since November 2020 in some recent months.
Sector-specific performance: While commercial and residential building both declined, civil engineering activity has been the weakest-performing segment.
Cost pressures: Despite weak demand, some periods have seen rising cost pressures from materials and wages.
Looking ahead
Business expectations: Business confidence has fluctuated, sometimes remaining positive due to hopes for future projects despite short-term challenges.
Contributing factors: Reasons cited for the downturn include economic uncertainty, higher borrowing costs, and a shortage of new projects.
Policy impact: The figures have been influenced by fiscal worries and potential tax changes, such as those rumoured for the November 2025 Budget.
When do we get the apologies from Reeves and Rayner ?
I'm pretty sure that this is not what they promised us. We were supposed to be building our way out of a housing crisis. It's not just about planning regulations, although the delivery there has been largely non existent too. It is about creating demand. By generating good quality jobs. And successful businesses. We have an economy that is basically flat being sustained by uncontrolled public spending and borrowing. An economy where the speculation about the next range of tax increases will start before Reeves' bottom hits the bench for this budget. No one wants to invest and more taxes will not improve that.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Background Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then.
Methods A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system.
Results Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital.
Conclusion In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver.
And from the conclusion:
Choice is only meaningful if there are realistic options and an experience of choice. We suggest our results reveal both a symptom and a cause: the lack of experienced choice may be a symptom of a lack of meaningful choice in the system, while aspects of the system's design may cause patients to experience less choice than intended. Our results paint a different picture to the case studies on the Choose and Book website [36]. While our findings about Choose and Book need replicating, they more generally match prior studies showing the public is not experiencing the intent of UK government policy on choice [17, 37]. Consumerist models of choice driving quality improvements fail if patients are not exercising that choice. Understanding the discordance between experience and policy intent is crucial to the success of the patient choice agenda. We suggest that consideration needs to be given as to whether choice of hospital should be the focus of patient choice and whether the nature of NHS services, or healthcare services in general, are such that a meaningful choice of place, date and time can ever be delivered.
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
This. Very much this. What is the point in raising more taxes to throw onto the bonfire?
We can't afford the faux-market structures inside the NHS and Education. Waste, duplication, inefficiency and a system that despite all that still doesn't have the capacity to offer market choice. Scrap it all. We can't afford the cost of cleaning up the mess from cuts. The taxis you mention are what happens when government dumps responsibility on councils but doesn't fund it. Taxis should be an emergency measure but ends up the default because there isn't any money to put alternatives in place.
And I could go on. We need significant reform of the way we do services - cutting the structure and the spending to improve the provision.
I have to ask - what the hell is government spending our money on? They stopped funding so many things - universities, councils, adult social care etc - yet we have record taxes and enormous debt.
Somewhere in the Yes, Minister canon, there is a Sir Humphrey line about "doing things more efficiently costs more".
It's played for laughs, and is meant as a joke about the madness of the Civil Service. But in certain situations, it's true. The British State right now is largely suffering from the converse of that line- trying to do things cheaply is very inefficient. We have tried to do things cheaply for a generation and now it has caught up with us. It was always going to in the end.
The British State doesn’t do cheap
Its Feast or Famine - either we have £100m bat tunnels or we cancel HS2
See the comments here, when I suggested a way that the British Museum could do a cheap solution to catalogue what’s in the basement.
Which reminds me that the British Library still haven’t got their computers back up and running properly, two years after they got hacked.
Systems for libraries and museums are really simple databases, you or I could probably scope one in an afternoon. It’s a big form for each item, perhaps links to related items, and a transactional system for ins and outs and moves. All well-indexed and searchable from a web page.
Ha no.
The British Library systems relate to running a large organisation, with a large inventory.
That’s always complex.
An important thing with IT is continuously replacing bits - it should be Trigger’s Broom.
Instead of steadily improving it, successive directors of the BL declared that IT wasn’t a “core function”*. Since this meant outsourcing, this made actually changing stuff really hard and expensive.
So grand, expensive projects were suggested, but never funded.
The nut and bolts replacement work didn’t happen.
The staff they had, were left to muddle on.
So, when they were attacked, the systems were archaic and insecure. Worst of all, the attackers went after infrastructure - they destroyed the systems themselves.
So the British Library has the *data*, but it is basically impossible to reconstruct the systems it ran on. They were full of fixes and undocumented changes - in many cases, the software is no longer available.
The British Library is trying to build a *completely new system*.
*Since reproduction isn’t a core function of Directors of the British Library, I propose a reduction in reproductive capability.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
Setting aside the poke at Francis, that is a classic.
...Crucial information, recorded on different systems by various authorities, was "lost" in handovers between staff, Mr Russell added...
...This is a report that cannot be allowed to gather dust...
...A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "These were horrendous crimes and we have apologised to the victims for the unacceptable failings in this case. "We have greatly improved information sharing between prisons and probation officers and all probation staff have received new, mandatory training on when offenders should be recalled." The second part of the review is due to be published in the autumn...
Half a decade on, what has changed ?
Realistically, who wants to be a prison officer? I'm sure there are some good ones who ended there by chance but it is disproportionately going to be a mix of people who don't care where they work (and by extension unlikely to care about work), sadists, those on a power trip who wouldn't get power elsewhere, and those without much choice.
Even if we made it well paid and resourced it properly, I'd expect management to be patchy and inconsistent. Given we make it harder and harder for prison officers, don't reward them well and leave prisons massively overcrowded I am surprised they function at all.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
Why any public sector is based in London is beyond me.
The UK construction PMI has shown a historic contraction, with the latest reading in October 2025 at 44.1, marking the tenth consecutive month below the 50-point expansion/contraction threshold. This marks the longest period of continuous decline since the global financial crisis. The sector has been negatively impacted by sluggish demand, a lack of new tender opportunities, and falling employment, with civil engineering activity falling particularly sharply.
Recent performance and key trends
Continuous contraction: The S&P Global UK Construction PMI has been below 50 for ten straight months as of October 2025, indicating a sustained downturn.
Sharpest decline in over five years: The rate of contraction in October 2025 was the sharpest since May 2020.
Weakening demand and new work: Construction firms report poor market conditions and fewer new projects, with civil engineering activity falling at the fastest pace since May 2020 due to a lack of new work to replace completed projects.
Job losses: Employment in the sector has dropped significantly, with the pace of job shedding accelerating to its fastest since November 2020 in some recent months.
Sector-specific performance: While commercial and residential building both declined, civil engineering activity has been the weakest-performing segment.
Cost pressures: Despite weak demand, some periods have seen rising cost pressures from materials and wages.
Looking ahead
Business expectations: Business confidence has fluctuated, sometimes remaining positive due to hopes for future projects despite short-term challenges.
Contributing factors: Reasons cited for the downturn include economic uncertainty, higher borrowing costs, and a shortage of new projects.
Policy impact: The figures have been influenced by fiscal worries and potential tax changes, such as those rumoured for the November 2025 Budget.
When do we get the apologies from Reeves and Rayner ?
Down here in Devon, builders are complaining there is no work. A mass of second homes are up for sale without even being tarted up. No point spending money as they aren't selling regardless of condition.
"They aren't selling regardless of condition" may be missing something out. There is a magical belief about property that there is a proper price it should fetch. With some exceptions property will sell as long as both parties have the same idea about price. That a house is worth exactly what a buyer is prepared to pay is a deep mystery to a lot of people.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
We simply send too many people to prison for too long in the first place. Theres always votes in "lock them up and throw away the key" but no votes in building the facilities to do so, even before the nimby problem.
I was pilloried here a week or so ago for suggesting that non-violent first offenders such as the Epping Hotel convict and Lucy Connolly did not belong in jail. The first should have been deported from the court, the second doing community service.
Of course Prison spaces are needed for violent offenders and for persistent offenders, but there is scope for better noncustodial sentences. Very few convicts come out better than they go in, and many come out as addicts and homeless so no wonder recidivism is so bad.
A rare point of agreement there Sir.
People who are not a danger to others should be given community punishments rather than imprisoned, and there should be more support for those leaving prison.
The current prisons minister, to his enormous credit, has a long history of supporting those who were formerly incarcerated.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
Setting aside the poke at Francis, that is a classic.
...Crucial information, recorded on different systems by various authorities, was "lost" in handovers between staff, Mr Russell added...
...This is a report that cannot be allowed to gather dust...
...A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "These were horrendous crimes and we have apologised to the victims for the unacceptable failings in this case. "We have greatly improved information sharing between prisons and probation officers and all probation staff have received new, mandatory training on when offenders should be recalled." The second part of the review is due to be published in the autumn...
Half a decade on, what has changed ?
Realistically, who wants to be a prison officer? I'm sure there are some good ones who ended there by chance but it is disproportionately going to be a mix of people who don't care where they work (and by extension unlikely to care about work), sadists, those on a power trip who wouldn't get power elsewhere, and those without much choice.
Even if we made it well paid and resourced it properly, I'd expect management to be patchy and inconsistent. Given we make it harder and harder for prison officers, don't reward them well and leave prisons massively overcrowded I am surprised they function at all.
It has been revealed they have been hiring from abroad for prison officers, I believe Nigeria being a hotspot (a country not exactly known for its lack of corruption). Also, certain prison officer duties have been replaced by lower cost "civilian" roles, which is mind blowing to me.
It has been widely reported that here is serious concerns that clean skins for organised crime are now well embedded across the system. The undercover documentaries over the past few years have shown up how poor the background checks where journalists have been able to really easily get jobs without using fake names (or that documentary makers have had to recruit existing employees).
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
Councils are in a terrible state, some of it cuts, but others by a dramatic increase in costs, obliged on them by the courts moving the line for what they are required to provide. Some costs around children services are extraordinary, there's no cap on looked after children in care costs. A local council to me has a single child in care (one child) costing over £25k a week. A week!!
Like every entitlement, every piece of public spending, they'll be some rationale behind it all. But there needs to be some tough loving going on somewhere.
The really frightening bit is when the council officers start to break down that £25k and it suddenly starts to make sense...
A lot is made about the cost of old-age care for councils, but don't ignore child and adult social care . It remains a very large proportion of budgets.
Totally agree. The sooner we junk that pile of crap X from UK servers the better.
I never use it. I hate it. Any link with an X prefix I just ignore. My life is none the poorer for it.
I find it exceptionally useful, and there isn't really anything better for up to date news and general information.
But it does require a ruthless determination to weed out the stuff designed to wind up or outrage. You can mute entire topics as well as individuals, so it's not that hard. Allied to a bit of effort finding the stuff you do want to follow, and it's preferable to most news sites.
But I'd agree that 90% or more of what it offers is utterly toxic.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
Setting aside the poke at Francis, that is a classic.
...Crucial information, recorded on different systems by various authorities, was "lost" in handovers between staff, Mr Russell added...
...This is a report that cannot be allowed to gather dust...
...A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "These were horrendous crimes and we have apologised to the victims for the unacceptable failings in this case. "We have greatly improved information sharing between prisons and probation officers and all probation staff have received new, mandatory training on when offenders should be recalled." The second part of the review is due to be published in the autumn...
Half a decade on, what has changed ?
Realistically, who wants to be a prison officer? I'm sure there are some good ones who ended there by chance but it is disproportionately going to be a mix of people who don't care where they work (and by extension unlikely to care about work), sadists, those on a power trip who wouldn't get power elsewhere, and those without much choice.
Even if we made it well paid and resourced it properly, I'd expect management to be patchy and inconsistent. Given we make it harder and harder for prison officers, don't reward them well and leave prisons massively overcrowded I am surprised they function at all.
It has been revealed they have been hiring from abroad for prison officers. Also, certain prison officer duties have been replaced by lower cost "civilian" roles, which is mind blowing to me.
It has been widely reported that here is serious concerns now that clean skins for organised crime is well embedded across the system. The undercover documentaries over the past few years have shown up how poor the background checks where journalists have been able to really easily get jobs without using fake names (or that documentary makers have had to recruit existing employees).
Why is it mind blowing? We have had almost two decades of cuts and lack of investment - when people voted for not putting up taxes what did they expect to happen? This is what happens.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
Setting aside the poke at Francis, that is a classic.
...Crucial information, recorded on different systems by various authorities, was "lost" in handovers between staff, Mr Russell added...
...This is a report that cannot be allowed to gather dust...
...A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "These were horrendous crimes and we have apologised to the victims for the unacceptable failings in this case. "We have greatly improved information sharing between prisons and probation officers and all probation staff have received new, mandatory training on when offenders should be recalled." The second part of the review is due to be published in the autumn...
Half a decade on, what has changed ?
Realistically, who wants to be a prison officer? I'm sure there are some good ones who ended there by chance but it is disproportionately going to be a mix of people who don't care where they work (and by extension unlikely to care about work), sadists, those on a power trip who wouldn't get power elsewhere, and those without much choice.
Even if we made it well paid and resourced it properly, I'd expect management to be patchy and inconsistent. Given we make it harder and harder for prison officers, don't reward them well and leave prisons massively overcrowded I am surprised they function at all.
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
Councils are in a terrible state, some of it cuts, but others by a dramatic increase in costs, obliged on them by the courts moving the line for what they are required to provide. Some costs around children services are extraordinary, there's no cap on looked after children in care costs. A local council to me has a single child in care (one child) costing over £25k a week. A week!!
Like every entitlement, every piece of public spending, they'll be some rationale behind it all. But there needs to be some tough loving going on somewhere.
Let’s say that they require 3 staff members per shift (rare but happens, especially with mentally ill teenagers with violent tendencies). That’s 9 core staff members to provide 24/7 cover. Add in another staff member to account for holiday cover and you will easily be a £400,000 p.a. in staff costs. You’ll also need say 25% of a team coordinator which is around £20k additional.
You will need at least a 3 bedroom property to support them - let’s assume that’s £350,000 of capital cost post adaption which they will rent at a 8% annual rate so probably another £30k per year at least.
So we are at £450k per year before you even start thinking about social charges on staff (probably another £40k per year), any medical interventions or support, education and life enhancement programmes. You could very easily get to £1m per year. You then add a 20% margin on top for the company that is doing all of this work and you easily get to £1.2m - £25k per week.
It's just not sustainable. What would have happened to children in this situation twenty five years ago?
25 years ago? What, in 2000? Pretty much exactly the same.
Not exactly. The service would probably have been run by the local authority; now it's likely a private provider paid by the LA.
I can't find figures for the cost of a child in care back then, but I do know that that cost has nearly doubled in the last five years alone.
The demand (abandoned children/ children in care with more difficult needs) vs the supply. Some LAs are opening their own again due to the exceptional costs. But nothing required them to close them in the first place.
Totally agree. The sooner we junk that pile of crap X from UK servers the better.
I never use it. I hate it. Any link with an X prefix I just ignore. My life is none the poorer for it.
X has a clear use. Matt cartoons free. PB posters linking to X, used selectively, is the best filter available to me. Are there other uses?
I still gain a lot of specalist knowledge from posts on X. But my follower list is carefully curated and I stay well clear of any politic type posters, and thus doesn't contain ragebaity stuff.
If we are willing to pay lots of money to have a super capable machine in our homes controlled by Elon Musk we actually don’t deserve to survive as a species.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
Indeed. Headcount may not even be an issue, if it’s a case of distributing people to the right places and getting more bang for your buck.
It’s very difficult for an institution to adapt to public need if there’s a bean counter somewhere who needs 50 authorisations and impact assessments to create a new role at a particular pay grade, with every budget meeting stressing the need for “pay restraint” rather than looking at waste and deregulation. There’s plenty of decent, hardworking people who’ve worked in the public sector long enough to be great managers and administrators who know what is needed, who are held back because there’s “no vacancy” above them and no way of the organisation adapting to their strengths, or who are subjected to the merry go round of chief execs on inflated pay being parachuted in from other sectors to deliver little practical benefit or change. So those people lose their ambitions and they get stuck.
So, 700 cops 6 arrests. Public sector productivity hits a new low.
This is at the core of when all the political talking heads are going I have looked at the data the trend of this or that crime stat is down, why the public go WTF....everybody understands crimes happen, what they don't expect is that a) the police just go nought we can do and b) when they do actually investigate they never catch anybody for certain types of crimes.
For things like your car been nicked its now here is your crime number for the insurance and jog on. For what could be a crime of stealing £50-100k item. Its not nicking a mar bars from the corner shop.
And we had reports that alleged train stabby stabby not only allegedly went stabby stabby the previous day but allegedl slashed somebody in the face the previous week and the plod closed the case within hours. Slashed in the face and the police shrug....
It feels like whataboutery but the case of Allison Pearson's tweet she deleted:
1 A social media post by Allison Pearson in 2023 was initially reported to the Metropolitan Police as a potential breach of the Malicious Communications Act in November 2024.
2 The case was then passed to Sussex Police, who marked it as a possible non-crime hate incident (NCHI) and potential malicious communication.
3 Sussex Police passed the complaint further to Essex Police, where Allison Pearson resides.
4 Essex Police made two assessments and then opened an investigation under section 17 of the Public Order Act 1986 related to material "likely or intended to cause racial hatred."
5 Essex Police sent officers to visit Pearson's home on Remembrance Sunday 2024 to discuss the alleged incident, describing it during the visit as a "non-crime hate incident," although the force later contested that characterization.
6 Several police forces including the Metropolitan Police and Sussex Police were involved at different stages before Essex Police took primary responsibility.
7 Essex Police set up a "gold group," usually reserved for major crimes, to handle the investigation of Pearson’s social media post, which escalated the seriousness of the inquiry.
8 Essex Police made an Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) complaint against The Telegraph’s reporting of the incident.
Surely as soon as it was assessed as "non-crime" the involvement of police should stop.
Or at most, passed straight to Essex Police (where she lives) and a couple of cops gone round to offer "words of advice" ie what a traffic cop does if he thinks you are driving like a dick but haven't reached a prosecutable threshold.
It's a fine line between "we've come to check your thinking" (Harry Millar), in what they are actually doing is fishing for Mens Rea to see if they can get a juicy hate crime, and "just want to chat about how close what you said was to breaching the law, we are here not because we want to stop you saying or doing what you currently are, but just some advice about when it might go over the line".
I think both are unacceptable to me personally and would involve a polite FO, but others might find it helpful, if it is a genuine conversation and not an attempt to trip up. Even saying that the discussion is not under caution (is that possible under PACE, to have a conversation not under caution, to prevent future crime?).
Sadly, you need to watch what you say in any interaction with the police force. They are only talking to you to gain evidence as they don't have it yet. If I would have been in that situation I would have told them to go off and catch criminals and shut the door. I suspect that it also benefitted Pearson because it gave her good content for her column.
There's absolutely no doubt it catapulted her career, and in a "don't hate the player" way, they scared the hell out of her and she turned it around. But you are right, there is no such thing as a friendly chat especially around these issues. Written communication does not have the same free speech protection that spoken has, and it can be incredibly easy to fall foul of actions that wouldnt get you in trouble in person. "So what did you mean when you said that you think foreign murdering criminals should get a taste of their own medicine? What was going through your mind? Did you think it would upset people? Isnt that what you do for a living? Did you want justice for the people who got hurt? Did you think that the person being foreign means they deserve to be hurt also? Did you want to make foreign people anxious?" Just enough to hang yourself. Almost everyone caught on what would be called free speech crimes over the last few years have hanged themselves in interview.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
They have several jobs to do. 1) keep people locked up 2) keep prison staff safe 3) keep locked up people fed, looked after and not killing each other 4) try to prepare them for reintroduction to society/rehabilitate
Totally agree. The sooner we junk that pile of crap X from UK servers the better.
I never use it. I hate it. Any link with an X prefix I just ignore. My life is none the poorer for it.
X has a clear use. Matt cartoons free. PB posters linking to X, used selectively, is the best filter available to me. Are there other uses?
I check out "For you" to get a sense of what other people are seeing online. It's not pretty.
The much derided Bluesky gives me everything I need in terms of politics data so I usually stick to that.
"For you" is actually a great tool. Five minutes spent every couple of days blocking the most virulent posters that appear in it cleans up your experience no end.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
I quite agree and the inertia on the big issues by this disappointing administration is mind numbing. That said even when they have achieved minor victories their comms are so bad they don't even announce them, not that the press would be interested.
I do get frustrated when Shadow Ministers lie and explain everything was hunky dory on their watch. There are Tories who acknowledge reality, Alex Chalke was on yesterday suggesting the prison system has been in crisis for years if not decades. Contrast that with Jenrick on Ferrari yesterday, who with a half truth blamed not only the current but the previous government for the collapse in asylum policy and the related collapse in prison management. But along with that half truth he distanced himself from the previous government by saying he resigned because they were all incompetent, ignoring the reality that he was front and centre of that incompetence.
Incumbency brings with it the reality of government and this lot need to pull their finger out or hand the show over to Farage sooner rather than later. But Kemi, Cartridge and Jenrick pretending they weren't in government as the whole edifice collapsed does stick in the craw.
Totally agree. The sooner we junk that pile of crap X from UK servers the better.
I never use it. I hate it. Any link with an X prefix I just ignore. My life is none the poorer for it.
X has a clear use. Matt cartoons free. PB posters linking to X, used selectively, is the best filter available to me. Are there other uses?
I still gain a lot of specalist knowledge from posts on X. But my follower list is carefully curated and I stay well clear of any politic type posters, and thus doesn't contain ragebaity stuff.
That’s the key, don’t actually follow a lot of people who comment on politics. My feed is all IT/aviation/motorsport/space/technology/Ukraine stuff unless I go looking for UK or US politics.
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
Councils are in a terrible state, some of it cuts, but others by a dramatic increase in costs, obliged on them by the courts moving the line for what they are required to provide. Some costs around children services are extraordinary, there's no cap on looked after children in care costs. A local council to me has a single child in care (one child) costing over £25k a week. A week!!
Like every entitlement, every piece of public spending, they'll be some rationale behind it all. But there needs to be some tough loving going on somewhere.
The really frightening bit is when the council officers start to break down that £25k and it suddenly starts to make sense...
A lot is made about the cost of old-age care for councils, but don't ignore child and adult social care . It remains a very large proportion of budgets.
Yes, you are right, everything always make sense when you break them down. But sometimes you need to resist just accepting the explanation to fix something. The reality is unitary councils and what's left of county councils are really just Children's & Adult social care providers with the rest of the council a bolt on. This is doubly so when you need to squeeze down the costs of the bolt on because the Children's services budget is £10s of millions over spent, each year, even when you keep increasing it.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
Surely it’s a simple process? Prisoner arrives from court and is “checked in”. Papers from court confirm release date. Release date is put into prison system on the Prisoner’s page with name, details and photo.
Prison receives written instructions from MoJ etc to confirm if prisoner is being released early - get prisoner from cell, check they are the same person as the system shows from check-in, release.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, prison system checked and the date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm in writing that its correct and he is being released earlier.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, system checked and date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm, MoJ say no, prisoner is not being released early so a mistake, prisoner goes back to cell.
It's usually more complicated than that. I was talking to a friend in the Prion Service about this - it isn't the 'end of sentence' releases that are the problem (they know when they are, exactly as you describe). it's when something changes, usually because of the end of a court case when someone has been on remand. Are they in for another offence? What has the court sentenced them to? To run concurrently or consecutively? How long have they already served? etc etc. Then often the instructions from the court are misleading or even wrong (another overstretched, under-resourced and underpaid environment prone to making mistakes).There is also Probation who often do daft things like insist on the prisoner reporting to their home office at 9:30 in the morning 300 miles away when they're being released from the middle of nowhere and there isn't a train until the morning
And then if they are non-UK Nationals they also have to check with Immigration, which means the dead hand of the Home Office.
And all this happens at 4:30 in the afternoon because that's when the courts get round to sending the paperwork out.
The other source of error is because the prisons are all full, often people are in the wrong one temporarily to balance out numbers so there are a lot of moves taking place all the time it's easier than you think to make mistakes.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
Surely it’s a simple process? Prisoner arrives from court and is “checked in”. Papers from court confirm release date. Release date is put into prison system on the Prisoner’s page with name, details and photo.
Prison receives written instructions from MoJ etc to confirm if prisoner is being released early - get prisoner from cell, check they are the same person as the system shows from check-in, release.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, prison system checked and the date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm in writing that its correct and he is being released earlier.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, system checked and date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm, MoJ say no, prisoner is not being released early so a mistake, prisoner goes back to cell.
It's usually more complicated than that. I was talking to a friend in the Prion Service...
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
This. Very much this. What is the point in raising more taxes to throw onto the bonfire?
We can't afford the faux-market structures inside the NHS and Education. Waste, duplication, inefficiency and a system that despite all that still doesn't have the capacity to offer market choice. Scrap it all. We can't afford the cost of cleaning up the mess from cuts. The taxis you mention are what happens when government dumps responsibility on councils but doesn't fund it. Taxis should be an emergency measure but ends up the default because there isn't any money to put alternatives in place.
And I could go on. We need significant reform of the way we do services - cutting the structure and the spending to improve the provision.
I have to ask - what the hell is government spending our money on? They stopped funding so many things - universities, councils, adult social care etc - yet we have record taxes and enormous debt.
Somewhere in the Yes, Minister canon, there is a Sir Humphrey line about "doing things more efficiently costs more".
It's played for laughs, and is meant as a joke about the madness of the Civil Service. But in certain situations, it's true. The British State right now is largely suffering from the converse of that line- trying to do things cheaply is very inefficient. We have tried to do things cheaply for a generation and now it has caught up with us. It was always going to in the end.
The British State doesn’t do cheap
Its Feast or Famine - either we have £100m bat tunnels or we cancel HS2
See the comments here, when I suggested a way that the British Museum could do a cheap solution to catalogue what’s in the basement.
Which reminds me that the British Library still haven’t got their computers back up and running properly, two years after they got hacked.
Systems for libraries and museums are really simple databases, you or I could probably scope one in an afternoon. It’s a big form for each item, perhaps links to related items, and a transactional system for ins and outs and moves. All well-indexed and searchable from a web page.
Ha no.
The British Library systems relate to running a large organisation, with a large inventory.
That’s always complex.
An important thing with IT is continuously replacing bits - it should be Trigger’s Broom.
Instead of steadily improving it, successive directors of the BL declared that IT wasn’t a “core function”*. Since this meant outsourcing, this made actually changing stuff really hard and expensive.
So grand, expensive projects were suggested, but never funded.
The nut and bolts replacement work didn’t happen.
The staff they had, were left to muddle on.
So, when they were attacked, the systems were archaic and insecure. Worst of all, the attackers went after infrastructure - they destroyed the systems themselves.
So the British Library has the *data*, but it is basically impossible to reconstruct the systems it ran on. They were full of fixes and undocumented changes - in many cases, the software is no longer available.
The British Library is trying to build a *completely new system*.
*Since reproduction isn’t a core function of Directors of the British Library, I propose a reduction in reproductive capability.
Haha yes, the theory vs practice of a simple database.
They’re way better off just buying something off-the-shelf, but no doubt it ends up like military procurement where they have to do something obvious in a special way, just because they always have - because that’s how the old system worked!
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
These mechanisms in the background are there to incentivise improvement and efficiency. You can argue they dont work effectively, but just because the punter doesnt care about anything other than the end product (their treatment) doesnt mean a sophisticated system of incentives and logistics sit behind it. The Amazon punter doesnt know (or care) how they can order something at 11:30pm and it is delivered by 10am, they just click on the buy now. But that doesnt mean what sits behind it is a simple process.
To be a serious contender for President Representative Marjorie Green needs to be elected as a Senator or Governor. She is also too hardline to beat any Democrat except a socialist like AOC, who also really needs a bigger office to be in contention.
Green did make some fair comments on Pelosi though, she was one of the most effective Speakers in history in terms of getting legislation passed and led her party to a majority in the House in 4 elections
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
Surely it’s a simple process? Prisoner arrives from court and is “checked in”. Papers from court confirm release date. Release date is put into prison system on the Prisoner’s page with name, details and photo.
Prison receives written instructions from MoJ etc to confirm if prisoner is being released early - get prisoner from cell, check they are the same person as the system shows from check-in, release.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, prison system checked and the date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm in writing that its correct and he is being released earlier.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, system checked and date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm, MoJ say no, prisoner is not being released early so a mistake, prisoner goes back to cell.
It's usually more complicated than that. I was talking to a friend in the Prion Service about this - it isn't the 'end of sentence' releases that are the problem (they know when they are, exactly as you describe). it's when something changes, usually because of the end of a court case when someone has been on remand. Are they in for another offence? What has the court sentenced them to? To run concurrently or consecutively? How long have they already served? etc etc. Then often the instructions from the court are misleading or even wrong (another overstretched, under-resourced and underpaid environment prone to making mistakes).There is also Probation who often do daft things like insist on the prisoner reporting to their home office at 9:30 in the morning 300 miles away when they're being released from the middle of nowhere and there isn't a train until the morning
And then if they are non-UK Nationals they also have to check with Immigration, which means the dead hand of the Home Office.
And all this happens at 4:30 in the afternoon because that's when the courts get round to sending the paperwork out.
The other source of error is because the prisons are all full, often people are in the wrong one temporarily to balance out numbers so there are a lot of moves taking place all the time it's easier than you think to make mistakes.
So as is often the case, what seems easy, isn't.
You're right, its not easy, but people need to take accountability and if mistakes are made then the system needs fixing.
Healthcare is comparatively complex and overworked but a nurse who gave medicine to the wrong patient (like prisons are releasing the wrong people) could face being struck off and losing their career.
If people don't care and just do whatever because there's no accountability then mistakes are more likely.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Background Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then.
Methods A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system.
Results Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital.
Conclusion In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver.
And from the conclusion:
Choice is only meaningful if there are realistic options and an experience of choice. We suggest our results reveal both a symptom and a cause: the lack of experienced choice may be a symptom of a lack of meaningful choice in the system, while aspects of the system's design may cause patients to experience less choice than intended. Our results paint a different picture to the case studies on the Choose and Book website [36]. While our findings about Choose and Book need replicating, they more generally match prior studies showing the public is not experiencing the intent of UK government policy on choice [17, 37]. Consumerist models of choice driving quality improvements fail if patients are not exercising that choice. Understanding the discordance between experience and policy intent is crucial to the success of the patient choice agenda. We suggest that consideration needs to be given as to whether choice of hospital should be the focus of patient choice and whether the nature of NHS services, or healthcare services in general, are such that a meaningful choice of place, date and time can ever be delivered.
Choose and Book doesn't work for two reasons.
1) proper choice requires an informed consumer, who knows better than a professional who is the best person or place to be seen for their condition.
2) spare capacity, so there are appointments to be had.
Neither really exist except for the most straightforward conditions.
I think MTG has at least TWO holes in her head, not one, if we are to take a charitable view, and her account that she was a cosmic victim (not my inclination).
One is that she is a gullible for some of the most poisonous and crazy ideological and political ideas that we see anywhere. The second that she has no sense of judgement or underlying values and principles with which to evaluate those crazed ideas.
To my mind, the best comparison for such would be David Icke.
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
This. Very much this. What is the point in raising more taxes to throw onto the bonfire?
We can't afford the faux-market structures inside the NHS and Education. Waste, duplication, inefficiency and a system that despite all that still doesn't have the capacity to offer market choice. Scrap it all. We can't afford the cost of cleaning up the mess from cuts. The taxis you mention are what happens when government dumps responsibility on councils but doesn't fund it. Taxis should be an emergency measure but ends up the default because there isn't any money to put alternatives in place.
And I could go on. We need significant reform of the way we do services - cutting the structure and the spending to improve the provision.
I have to ask - what the hell is government spending our money on? They stopped funding so many things - universities, councils, adult social care etc - yet we have record taxes and enormous debt.
I would point out that the problem of these prison releases is the opposite. To much on the front line and skimping on the admin.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
I quite agree and the inertia on the big issues by this disappointing administration is mind numbing. That said even when they have achieved minor victories their comms are so bad they don't even announce them, not that the press would be interested.
I do get frustrated when Shadow Ministers lie and explain everything was hunky dory on their watch. There are Tories who acknowledge reality, Alex Chalke was on yesterday suggesting the prison system has been in crisis for years if not decades. Contrast that with Jenrick on Ferrari yesterday, who with a half truth blamed not only the current but the previous government for the collapse in asylum policy and the related collapse in prison management. But along with that half truth he distanced himself from the previous government by saying he resigned because they were all incompetent, ignoring the reality that he was front and centre of that incompetence.
Incumbency brings with it the reality of government and this lot need to pull their finger out or hand the show over to Farage sooner rather than later. But Kemi, Cartridge and Jenrick pretending they weren't in government as the whole edifice collapsed does stick in the craw.
Their sneering hypocrisy is one of the reasons the polls show them heading for minibus numbers at the next election. People hate it, and it reminds them of why they voted them out.
Anyway, the problem is simple. We need to change the systems and simplify the structures. Which costs more as you do it, and we're "broke" supposedly.
In the business world this is called investment. My shop had very inefficient florescent light fittings. Cost a LOT in electricity. So I invested in LED panels. Spend more up front, to then save a lot every month that follows. Borrow. Invest. Gain a return on the investment. CAPITALISM - that thing the Tories used to represent before they got bought by the banks and the spivs.
Will it cost a little more to scrap these structures and cut the now redundant workforce? Sure. With huge savings delivered afterwards. Will it cost more to hire more cops and run the courts more and create prison space? Absolutely - with a big drop in the cost of crime afterwards. Will it cost money to invest in our towns and cities so that the streets aren't full of weeds and potholes? Sure - but look at the economic growth in places like Manchester.
Borrow. Invest. ROI.
Thanks to the Tories all we ever get - from Labour as well who were forced to adopt the same language - is "how will you pay for that", not "what benefits do we get from that". And at the moment absurd political / treasury orthodoxy has it that cuts save money with no cost. Which is laughably untrue.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
Why any public sector is based in London is beyond me.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
As you probably know yourself, it is extraordinarily hard to change anything significantly, as an elected politician. Firstly, political roles with any influence come with a stack of work just to keep plates spinning (the extent to which officials are adept at keeping their politicians 'busy' with the minor stuff, per Yes Minister, one can debate). Then, you have to have the influence within your own political party - assuming it has a majority - to persuade your colleagues both of the need for change and to give it political priority, when there are always more things to do than capacity to do them. Any change of significance will come with up front costs, risks, and political consequences, with the benefits often way downstream - quite possibly when you're out of office and some other guy or gal will be in your chair, which makes it hard to sell politically, both to colleagues and then to the wider world. Your staff are already overworked and highly skilled, as an understandable self-protection, at putting obstacles in the way of anything that will be time-consuming and risky, since their careers as well as your own are likely on the line if anything goes really tits up. Anyone in a senior position, especially in the public sector, knows that the 'power' such roles appear to have is largely illusory, given the array of stakeholders and vested interests that need to be got on board and the lack of resources, human, physical and financial. It takes exceptional drive to push through all of this, and it's almost a golden rule that any politician can only push one such project at a time, the delivery of which could easily take years. You need a firm ally among senior staff, since as a politician - whether minister or councillor - you don't have much formal power to manage or issue direct orders to staff yourself. And you're doing all this in a world where many of your colleagues are risk-averse time-servers who just want to stay in their big chairs, with others supposedly on your side actually hoping you'll mess up so they can take your job, and surrounded by political opponents whose principal interest is in seeing you fail.
Give Lisa Nandy a bung, Lisa Nandy appoints you to something - how is this not gold standard corruption? It’s surely the very definition of corrupt regime, corrupt moneymaking cronyism.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
And then because they can't fill those £50k manager posts, they fill them instead with people like me (and I assume, you) paying £1000 a day to an IT Consultancy who skim off much of that so it costs twice as much as it would do to employ someone directly at the market rate.
(And £50k has to be the absolute minimum salary for anything in London, as you will pay most of that in rent and travel)
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
These mechanisms in the background are there to incentivise improvement and efficiency. You can argue they dont work effectively, but just because the punter doesnt care about anything other than the end product (their treatment) doesnt mean a sophisticated system of incentives and logistics sit behind it. The Amazon punter doesnt know (or care) how they can order something at 11:30pm and it is delivered by 10am, they just click on the buy now. But that doesnt mean what sits behind it is a simple process.
But they *don't* do that.
Where is the efficiency in fragmenting the structure so that instead of centralised buying power you let each individual outlet do it?
I gave you IT procurement as an example, let me give you another - catering. The cost for the foodservice industry to trade and supply individual trusts and schools is vastly more than via the LEA. So the deal offered is worse because scale produces efficiencies and lower prices, and the higher operating cost is added.
In the private sector you add scale and cut duplication. In the public sector we do the opposite. No wonder we are broke.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Background Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then.
Methods A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system.
Results Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital.
Conclusion In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver.
And from the conclusion:
Choice is only meaningful if there are realistic options and an experience of choice. We suggest our results reveal both a symptom and a cause: the lack of experienced choice may be a symptom of a lack of meaningful choice in the system, while aspects of the system's design may cause patients to experience less choice than intended. Our results paint a different picture to the case studies on the Choose and Book website [36]. While our findings about Choose and Book need replicating, they more generally match prior studies showing the public is not experiencing the intent of UK government policy on choice [17, 37]. Consumerist models of choice driving quality improvements fail if patients are not exercising that choice. Understanding the discordance between experience and policy intent is crucial to the success of the patient choice agenda. We suggest that consideration needs to be given as to whether choice of hospital should be the focus of patient choice and whether the nature of NHS services, or healthcare services in general, are such that a meaningful choice of place, date and time can ever be delivered.
Choose and Book doesn't work for two reasons.
1) proper choice requires an informed consumer, who knows better than a professional who is the best person or place to be seen for their condition.
2) spare capacity, so there are appointments to be had.
Neither really exist except for the most straightforward conditions.
Patient choice allowed my partner to get a different doctor than the one who spent her entire appointment talking at me.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
I quite agree and the inertia on the big issues by this disappointing administration is mind numbing. That said even when they have achieved minor victories their comms are so bad they don't even announce them, not that the press would be interested.
I do get frustrated when Shadow Ministers lie and explain everything was hunky dory on their watch. There are Tories who acknowledge reality, Alex Chalke was on yesterday suggesting the prison system has been in crisis for years if not decades. Contrast that with Jenrick on Ferrari yesterday, who with a half truth blamed not only the current but the previous government for the collapse in asylum policy and the related collapse in prison management. But along with that half truth he distanced himself from the previous government by saying he resigned because they were all incompetent, ignoring the reality that he was front and centre of that incompetence.
Incumbency brings with it the reality of government and this lot need to pull their finger out or hand the show over to Farage sooner rather than later. But Kemi, Cartridge and Jenrick pretending they weren't in government as the whole edifice collapsed does stick in the craw.
Their sneering hypocrisy is one of the reasons the polls show them heading for minibus numbers at the next election. People hate it, and it reminds them of why they voted them out.
Anyway, the problem is simple. We need to change the systems and simplify the structures. Which costs more as you do it, and we're "broke" supposedly.
In the business world this is called investment. My shop had very inefficient florescent light fittings. Cost a LOT in electricity. So I invested in LED panels. Spend more up front, to then save a lot every month that follows. Borrow. Invest. Gain a return on the investment. CAPITALISM - that thing the Tories used to represent before they got bought by the banks and the spivs.
Will it cost a little more to scrap these structures and cut the now redundant workforce? Sure. With huge savings delivered afterwards. Will it cost more to hire more cops and run the courts more and create prison space? Absolutely - with a big drop in the cost of crime afterwards. Will it cost money to invest in our towns and cities so that the streets aren't full of weeds and potholes? Sure - but look at the economic growth in places like Manchester.
Borrow. Invest. ROI.
Thanks to the Tories all we ever get - from Labour as well who were forced to adopt the same language - is "how will you pay for that", not "what benefits do we get from that". And at the moment absurd political / treasury orthodoxy has it that cuts save money with no cost. Which is laughably untrue.
Also, we have had successive governments apparently unable to distinguish investment which provides a real return, from that which does not. You rightly point at Manchester, IMO, as I suspect it's entirely possible that sustained capital investment in regional cities would provide a greater return than that in London, which has taken the lion's share since forever.
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
This. Very much this. What is the point in raising more taxes to throw onto the bonfire?
We can't afford the faux-market structures inside the NHS and Education. Waste, duplication, inefficiency and a system that despite all that still doesn't have the capacity to offer market choice. Scrap it all. We can't afford the cost of cleaning up the mess from cuts. The taxis you mention are what happens when government dumps responsibility on councils but doesn't fund it. Taxis should be an emergency measure but ends up the default because there isn't any money to put alternatives in place.
And I could go on. We need significant reform of the way we do services - cutting the structure and the spending to improve the provision.
I have to ask - what the hell is government spending our money on? They stopped funding so many things - universities, councils, adult social care etc - yet we have record taxes and enormous debt.
I would point out that the problem of these prison releases is the opposite. To much on the front line and skimping on the admin.
Yes and no.
Not enough cops, not enough CPS capacity, courts can't process cases, prisons are full, early release needed.
And then you get privatised contracted and subcontracted services where people who are poorly trained and demoralised get to make decisions with wrong or missing information.
If we spent on the front line we would have prison capacity and staff who know what they are doing.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
Surely it’s a simple process? Prisoner arrives from court and is “checked in”. Papers from court confirm release date. Release date is put into prison system on the Prisoner’s page with name, details and photo.
Prison receives written instructions from MoJ etc to confirm if prisoner is being released early - get prisoner from cell, check they are the same person as the system shows from check-in, release.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, prison system checked and the date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm in writing that its correct and he is being released earlier.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, system checked and date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm, MoJ say no, prisoner is not being released early so a mistake, prisoner goes back to cell.
It's usually more complicated than that. I was talking to a friend in the Prion Service about this - it isn't the 'end of sentence' releases that are the problem (they know when they are, exactly as you describe). it's when something changes, usually because of the end of a court case when someone has been on remand. Are they in for another offence? What has the court sentenced them to? To run concurrently or consecutively? How long have they already served? etc etc. Then often the instructions from the court are misleading or even wrong (another overstretched, under-resourced and underpaid environment prone to making mistakes).There is also Probation who often do daft things like insist on the prisoner reporting to their home office at 9:30 in the morning 300 miles away when they're being released from the middle of nowhere and there isn't a train until the morning
And then if they are non-UK Nationals they also have to check with Immigration, which means the dead hand of the Home Office.
And all this happens at 4:30 in the afternoon because that's when the courts get round to sending the paperwork out.
The other source of error is because the prisons are all full, often people are in the wrong one temporarily to balance out numbers so there are a lot of moves taking place all the time it's easier than you think to make mistakes.
So as is often the case, what seems easy, isn't.
Stick to the bottom line here - soon as Labour got into power and saying too many people locked up too long, in other words Labour on side of criminals not victims, has there been an explosion of manhunts for mistaken release or not?
I’m pleased the media have stopped trying to pretend it just one or two, and now asking just how many unsolved manhunts due to early release do the police have outstanding at the moment - that is the only question to be answered and put into headlines right now.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
I quite agree and the inertia on the big issues by this disappointing administration is mind numbing. That said even when they have achieved minor victories their comms are so bad they don't even announce them, not that the press would be interested.
I do get frustrated when Shadow Ministers lie and explain everything was hunky dory on their watch. There are Tories who acknowledge reality, Alex Chalke was on yesterday suggesting the prison system has been in crisis for years if not decades. Contrast that with Jenrick on Ferrari yesterday, who with a half truth blamed not only the current but the previous government for the collapse in asylum policy and the related collapse in prison management. But along with that half truth he distanced himself from the previous government by saying he resigned because they were all incompetent, ignoring the reality that he was front and centre of that incompetence.
Incumbency brings with it the reality of government and this lot need to pull their finger out or hand the show over to Farage sooner rather than later. But Kemi, Cartridge and Jenrick pretending they weren't in government as the whole edifice collapsed does stick in the craw.
Their sneering hypocrisy is one of the reasons the polls show them heading for minibus numbers at the next election. People hate it, and it reminds them of why they voted them out.
Anyway, the problem is simple. We need to change the systems and simplify the structures. Which costs more as you do it, and we're "broke" supposedly.
In the business world this is called investment. My shop had very inefficient florescent light fittings. Cost a LOT in electricity. So I invested in LED panels. Spend more up front, to then save a lot every month that follows. Borrow. Invest. Gain a return on the investment. CAPITALISM - that thing the Tories used to represent before they got bought by the banks and the spivs.
Will it cost a little more to scrap these structures and cut the now redundant workforce? Sure. With huge savings delivered afterwards. Will it cost more to hire more cops and run the courts more and create prison space? Absolutely - with a big drop in the cost of crime afterwards. Will it cost money to invest in our towns and cities so that the streets aren't full of weeds and potholes? Sure - but look at the economic growth in places like Manchester.
Borrow. Invest. ROI.
Thanks to the Tories all we ever get - from Labour as well who were forced to adopt the same language - is "how will you pay for that", not "what benefits do we get from that". And at the moment absurd political / treasury orthodoxy has it that cuts save money with no cost. Which is laughably untrue.
The current ludicrous assertion that all taxation is unacceptable and Tories don't tax has captured those reading the Mail, Express and Telegraph and in other media GBNews and TalkTV (as an aside binning OfCom would raise a packet as they have been hopeless with calling GBNews to account).
I do wonder whether somewhere in the Tory brain, perhaps Dominic Cummings, the idea was hatched that if welfare is "spaffed" around to such an egregious extent under the Tory watch that the clamour to get rid of welfare safety net altogether for whoever came next was the aim. The idea that you are entitled to a Motability BMW M5 if you feel sad is the culmination, and that happened on the Tory Watch.
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
This. Very much this. What is the point in raising more taxes to throw onto the bonfire?
We can't afford the faux-market structures inside the NHS and Education. Waste, duplication, inefficiency and a system that despite all that still doesn't have the capacity to offer market choice. Scrap it all. We can't afford the cost of cleaning up the mess from cuts. The taxis you mention are what happens when government dumps responsibility on councils but doesn't fund it. Taxis should be an emergency measure but ends up the default because there isn't any money to put alternatives in place.
And I could go on. We need significant reform of the way we do services - cutting the structure and the spending to improve the provision.
I have to ask - what the hell is government spending our money on? They stopped funding so many things - universities, councils, adult social care etc - yet we have record taxes and enormous debt.
I would point out that the problem of these prison releases is the opposite. To much on the front line and skimping on the admin.
Yes and no.
Not enough cops, not enough CPS capacity, courts can't process cases, prisons are full, early release needed.
And then you get privatised contracted and subcontracted services where people who are poorly trained and demoralised get to make decisions with wrong or missing information.
If we spent on the front line we would have prison capacity and staff who know what they are doing.
Well with all the extra tax Reeves is raising and proposing to raise in the Budget perhaps she could put some of it into the CPS and prison service? Assuming she doesn't start to lose revenue and high earners and the wealthy don't start to move to lower tax nations abroad
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
Surely it’s a simple process? Prisoner arrives from court and is “checked in”. Papers from court confirm release date. Release date is put into prison system on the Prisoner’s page with name, details and photo.
Prison receives written instructions from MoJ etc to confirm if prisoner is being released early - get prisoner from cell, check they are the same person as the system shows from check-in, release.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, prison system checked and the date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm in writing that its correct and he is being released earlier.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, system checked and date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm, MoJ say no, prisoner is not being released early so a mistake, prisoner goes back to cell.
It's usually more complicated than that. I was talking to a friend in the Prion Service about this - it isn't the 'end of sentence' releases that are the problem (they know when they are, exactly as you describe). it's when something changes, usually because of the end of a court case when someone has been on remand. Are they in for another offence? What has the court sentenced them to? To run concurrently or consecutively? How long have they already served? etc etc. Then often the instructions from the court are misleading or even wrong (another overstretched, under-resourced and underpaid environment prone to making mistakes).There is also Probation who often do daft things like insist on the prisoner reporting to their home office at 9:30 in the morning 300 miles away when they're being released from the middle of nowhere and there isn't a train until the morning
And then if they are non-UK Nationals they also have to check with Immigration, which means the dead hand of the Home Office.
And all this happens at 4:30 in the afternoon because that's when the courts get round to sending the paperwork out.
The other source of error is because the prisons are all full, often people are in the wrong one temporarily to balance out numbers so there are a lot of moves taking place all the time it's easier than you think to make mistakes.
So as is often the case, what seems easy, isn't.
You're right, its not easy, but people need to take accountability and if mistakes are made then the system needs fixing.
Healthcare is comparatively complex and overworked but a nurse who gave medicine to the wrong patient (like prisons are releasing the wrong people) could face being struck off and losing their career.
If people don't care and just do whatever because there's no accountability then mistakes are more likely.
I agree with that - and if it's clear what the consequences are for the duty Governor signing off on releases then I'm sure it would get their full attention. At the cost of something else, no doubt. Either that or there will be no Governors quite quickly (there are probably easier ways to earn the same money).
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
And then because they can't fill those £50k manager posts, they fill them instead with people like me (and I assume, you) paying £1000 a day to an IT Consultancy who skim off much of that so it costs twice as much as it would do to employ someone directly at the market rate.
(And £50k has to be the absolute minimum salary for anything in London, as you will pay most of that in rent and travel)
Been there, done that.
Yes they’ll pay $BigConsultancy a bag of sand a day, who’ll pay their contractor £600 which is the actual going rate for the job. They could probably hire the contractor directly for £80k, but he doesn’t have all the right pieces of paper to pass the first sift of CVs.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Background Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then.
Methods A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system.
Results Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital.
Conclusion In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver.
And from the conclusion:
Choice is only meaningful if there are realistic options and an experience of choice. We suggest our results reveal both a symptom and a cause: the lack of experienced choice may be a symptom of a lack of meaningful choice in the system, while aspects of the system's design may cause patients to experience less choice than intended. Our results paint a different picture to the case studies on the Choose and Book website [36]. While our findings about Choose and Book need replicating, they more generally match prior studies showing the public is not experiencing the intent of UK government policy on choice [17, 37]. Consumerist models of choice driving quality improvements fail if patients are not exercising that choice. Understanding the discordance between experience and policy intent is crucial to the success of the patient choice agenda. We suggest that consideration needs to be given as to whether choice of hospital should be the focus of patient choice and whether the nature of NHS services, or healthcare services in general, are such that a meaningful choice of place, date and time can ever be delivered.
Choose and Book doesn't work for two reasons.
1) proper choice requires an informed consumer, who knows better than a professional who is the best person or place to be seen for their condition.
2) spare capacity, so there are appointments to be had.
Neither really exist except for the most straightforward conditions.
But for (2) you can still offer people a choice of time and date and potentially venue. What typically happens is the hospital writes to you and offers you a time and date which is massively inconvenient, but you know that if you refuse it you will go back in the queue and wait another six months.
Give me a website and let me book a time and venue that suits me. It may still be six months ahead but the likelihood I can make it is massively increased.
And for some reason I can only be treated near where I live. Now I understand some people want or need to be treated locally but why not use those of us more mobile to average out demand on a regional or national basis?
On topic I think Maga support whoever Trump supports and Trump supports either a member of his family or whoever pays him the most. Then there will presumably be someone running against that person representing moving on from Maga. I may be missing something but I don't really see what the market is for Maga, but no longer in the tent.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Except that the NHS is remarkably efficient (or as another poster put it frugal) compared to other equivalent nations healthcare systems. The idea that the NHS is somehow drowning in admin is ridiculous. And giving patients a choice of hospitals doesn't require a shiny new admin building.
People often accuse reform voters/supporters of harking back to the past. In a way your version of the NHS is doing the same thing. People get frustrated with how GP surgeries run. I think they fail to understand the pressures on primary care. The huge increase in people over 65 in the last quarter century. The ever increase in things that we can do (hip, knee replacement seen as commonplace). Back in the 80's you would probably have walked into the GP surgery, collected a number (like the old delicounter in the supermarket) and waited your turn. I think a lot of people still want to do that. But is it the best way to run a surgery?
I don't actually disagree re hospitals, but what is really needed is the older cottage hospitals. Essentially well but infirm elderly patients evicted from the main surgical hospitals and out to their own home towns, near their families and friends. Less care needed, but still need looking after.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Background Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then.
Methods A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system.
Results Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital.
Conclusion In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver.
And from the conclusion:
Choice is only meaningful if there are realistic options and an experience of choice. We suggest our results reveal both a symptom and a cause: the lack of experienced choice may be a symptom of a lack of meaningful choice in the system, while aspects of the system's design may cause patients to experience less choice than intended. Our results paint a different picture to the case studies on the Choose and Book website [36]. While our findings about Choose and Book need replicating, they more generally match prior studies showing the public is not experiencing the intent of UK government policy on choice [17, 37]. Consumerist models of choice driving quality improvements fail if patients are not exercising that choice. Understanding the discordance between experience and policy intent is crucial to the success of the patient choice agenda. We suggest that consideration needs to be given as to whether choice of hospital should be the focus of patient choice and whether the nature of NHS services, or healthcare services in general, are such that a meaningful choice of place, date and time can ever be delivered.
Choose and Book doesn't work for two reasons.
1) proper choice requires an informed consumer, who knows better than a professional who is the best person or place to be seen for their condition.
2) spare capacity, so there are appointments to be had.
Neither really exist except for the most straightforward conditions.
But for (2) you can still offer people a choice of time and date and potentially venue. What typically happens is the hospital writes to you and offers you a time and date which is massively inconvenient, but you know that if you refuse it you will go back in the queue and wait another six months.
Give me a website and let me book a time and venue that suits me. It may still be six months ahead but the likelihood I can make it is massively increased.
And for some reason I can only be treated near where I live. Now I understand some people want or need to be treated locally but why not use those of us more mobile to average out demand on a regional or national basis?
If we had regional or national structures we could do that. We don't.
Totally agree. The sooner we junk that pile of crap X from UK servers the better.
I never use it. I hate it. Any link with an X prefix I just ignore. My life is none the poorer for it.
X has a clear use. Matt cartoons free. PB posters linking to X, used selectively, is the best filter available to me. Are there other uses?
I still gain a lot of specalist knowledge from posts on X. But my follower list is carefully curated and I stay well clear of any politic type posters, and thus doesn't contain ragebaity stuff.
That’s the key, don’t actually follow a lot of people who comment on politics. My feed is all IT/aviation/motorsport/space/technology/Ukraine stuff unless I go looking for UK or US politics.
We can tell by your level-headed analyses of US politics that don't suggest, in any way, that you've fallen down a MAGA social media hole.
IF YOU ARE UPSET ABOUT THE COMPOSITION OF ADVERTS FOR WASHING POWDER LOOK AWAY NOW.
I was looking, because why not, at the 6 Music Artists of the Year 2025 and readers will be thrilled to hear that of the seven solo artists (Ethel Cain, FKA Twigs, Jacob Alon, jasmine.4.t, Kae Tempest, CMAT, Blood Orange), four are trans or non-binary (Ethel Cain, Jacob Alon, Kae Tempest, jasmine.4.t). CMAT is bisexual but who's counting.
That said, or perhaps as expected, as I am working through the ones I don't know on Amazon Music, they can produce bloody good music. I saw Ethel Cain at the Hammersmith Apollo Eventim the other day and she was sublime.
And yes what was an old white straight bloke doing at an Ethel Cain concert.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Background Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then.
Methods A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system.
Results Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital.
Conclusion In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver.
And from the conclusion:
Choice is only meaningful if there are realistic options and an experience of choice. We suggest our results reveal both a symptom and a cause: the lack of experienced choice may be a symptom of a lack of meaningful choice in the system, while aspects of the system's design may cause patients to experience less choice than intended. Our results paint a different picture to the case studies on the Choose and Book website [36]. While our findings about Choose and Book need replicating, they more generally match prior studies showing the public is not experiencing the intent of UK government policy on choice [17, 37]. Consumerist models of choice driving quality improvements fail if patients are not exercising that choice. Understanding the discordance between experience and policy intent is crucial to the success of the patient choice agenda. We suggest that consideration needs to be given as to whether choice of hospital should be the focus of patient choice and whether the nature of NHS services, or healthcare services in general, are such that a meaningful choice of place, date and time can ever be delivered.
Choose and Book doesn't work for two reasons.
1) proper choice requires an informed consumer, who knows better than a professional who is the best person or place to be seen for their condition.
2) spare capacity, so there are appointments to be had.
Neither really exist except for the most straightforward conditions.
Patient choice allowed my partner to get a different doctor than the one who spent her entire appointment talking at me.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
And then because they can't fill those £50k manager posts, they fill them instead with people like me (and I assume, you) paying £1000 a day to an IT Consultancy who skim off much of that so it costs twice as much as it would do to employ someone directly at the market rate.
(And £50k has to be the absolute minimum salary for anything in London, as you will pay most of that in rent and travel)
As I already pointed out to you, £50k is ABOVE the median salary in London so most Londoners are already paying most of their salaries in rent and travel. Hence most London residents almost always vote Labour and more live in social homes and most rent.
The most sensible London workers by middle age have moved out to the home counties, here in Essex for example you can earn a London salary with half the living costs and buy a property far cheaper in most areas. Hence even in 2024 most of Essex did not vote Labour
Totally agree. The sooner we junk that pile of crap X from UK servers the better.
I never use it. I hate it. Any link with an X prefix I just ignore. My life is none the poorer for it.
X has a clear use. Matt cartoons free. PB posters linking to X, used selectively, is the best filter available to me. Are there other uses?
I still gain a lot of specalist knowledge from posts on X. But my follower list is carefully curated and I stay well clear of any politic type posters, and thus doesn't contain ragebaity stuff.
That’s the key, don’t actually follow a lot of people who comment on politics. My feed is all IT/aviation/motorsport/space/technology/Ukraine stuff unless I go looking for UK or US politics.
Ok, I get that, but you guys are kind of like the people who say they only buy the Daily Mail for the crossword, or the fashions, or whatever. You're still supporting a toxic product.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
These mechanisms in the background are there to incentivise improvement and efficiency. You can argue they dont work effectively, but just because the punter doesnt care about anything other than the end product (their treatment) doesnt mean a sophisticated system of incentives and logistics sit behind it. The Amazon punter doesnt know (or care) how they can order something at 11:30pm and it is delivered by 10am, they just click on the buy now. But that doesnt mean what sits behind it is a simple process.
But where's the evidence that the internal markets are deliving improvement and efficiency?
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
Surely it’s a simple process? Prisoner arrives from court and is “checked in”. Papers from court confirm release date. Release date is put into prison system on the Prisoner’s page with name, details and photo.
Prison receives written instructions from MoJ etc to confirm if prisoner is being released early - get prisoner from cell, check they are the same person as the system shows from check-in, release.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, prison system checked and the date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm in writing that its correct and he is being released earlier.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, system checked and date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm, MoJ say no, prisoner is not being released early so a mistake, prisoner goes back to cell.
It's usually more complicated than that. I was talking to a friend in the Prion Service about this - it isn't the 'end of sentence' releases that are the problem (they know when they are, exactly as you describe). it's when something changes, usually because of the end of a court case when someone has been on remand. Are they in for another offence? What has the court sentenced them to? To run concurrently or consecutively? How long have they already served? etc etc. Then often the instructions from the court are misleading or even wrong (another overstretched, under-resourced and underpaid environment prone to making mistakes).There is also Probation who often do daft things like insist on the prisoner reporting to their home office at 9:30 in the morning 300 miles away when they're being released from the middle of nowhere and there isn't a train until the morning
And then if they are non-UK Nationals they also have to check with Immigration, which means the dead hand of the Home Office.
And all this happens at 4:30 in the afternoon because that's when the courts get round to sending the paperwork out.
The other source of error is because the prisons are all full, often people are in the wrong one temporarily to balance out numbers so there are a lot of moves taking place all the time it's easier than you think to make mistakes.
So as is often the case, what seems easy, isn't.
You're right, its not easy, but people need to take accountability and if mistakes are made then the system needs fixing.
Healthcare is comparatively complex and overworked but a nurse who gave medicine to the wrong patient (like prisons are releasing the wrong people) could face being struck off and losing their career.
If people don't care and just do whatever because there's no accountability then mistakes are more likely.
I think it would be unusual for a nurse to be struck off for giving medicine to the wrong patient once, unless it led to a very serious outcome. And more prison officers go to jail for misconduct than nurses!
Healthcare is complex and medical errors happen all the time!
So, 700 cops 6 arrests. Public sector productivity hits a new low.
This is at the core of when all the political talking heads are going I have looked at the data the trend of this or that crime stat is down, why the public go WTF....everybody understands crimes happen, what they don't expect is that a) the police just go nought we can do and b) when they do actually investigate they never catch anybody for certain types of crimes.
For things like your car been nicked its now here is your crime number for the insurance and jog on. For what could be a crime of stealing £50-100k item. Its not nicking a mar bars from the corner shop.
And we had reports that alleged train stabby stabby not only allegedly went stabby stabby the previous day but allegedl slashed somebody in the face the previous week and the plod closed the case within hours. Slashed in the face and the police shrug....
It feels like whataboutery but the case of Allison Pearson's tweet she deleted:
1 A social media post by Allison Pearson in 2023 was initially reported to the Metropolitan Police as a potential breach of the Malicious Communications Act in November 2024.
2 The case was then passed to Sussex Police, who marked it as a possible non-crime hate incident (NCHI) and potential malicious communication.
3 Sussex Police passed the complaint further to Essex Police, where Allison Pearson resides.
4 Essex Police made two assessments and then opened an investigation under section 17 of the Public Order Act 1986 related to material "likely or intended to cause racial hatred."
5 Essex Police sent officers to visit Pearson's home on Remembrance Sunday 2024 to discuss the alleged incident, describing it during the visit as a "non-crime hate incident," although the force later contested that characterization.
6 Several police forces including the Metropolitan Police and Sussex Police were involved at different stages before Essex Police took primary responsibility.
7 Essex Police set up a "gold group," usually reserved for major crimes, to handle the investigation of Pearson’s social media post, which escalated the seriousness of the inquiry.
8 Essex Police made an Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) complaint against The Telegraph’s reporting of the incident.
Weeks of fruitful work, to paraphrase Sir Humphrey.
Totally agree. The sooner we junk that pile of crap X from UK servers the better.
I never use it. I hate it. Any link with an X prefix I just ignore. My life is none the poorer for it.
X has a clear use. Matt cartoons free. PB posters linking to X, used selectively, is the best filter available to me. Are there other uses?
I still gain a lot of specalist knowledge from posts on X. But my follower list is carefully curated and I stay well clear of any politic type posters, and thus doesn't contain ragebaity stuff.
That’s the key, don’t actually follow a lot of people who comment on politics. My feed is all IT/aviation/motorsport/space/technology/Ukraine stuff unless I go looking for UK or US politics.
We can tell by your level-headed analyses of US politics that don't suggest, in any way, that you've fallen down a MAGA social media hole.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
Why any public sector is based in London is beyond me.
All public sector work, beyond frontline services, should be moved out of overheated and overexpensive London. Move all civil servants elsewhere.
I'd move Parliament and the PM's office too while we're at it.
I think the experience of the ONS, based in Newport, offers a cautionary tale. It's hard to get good people to move to Newport, where there are few other employers of graduates with advanced skills in the area of data and statistics. Once you're there and have kids in school and put down roots you have no other job to go to. Your spouse might not find good work either. The ONS has been bedeviled by problems and mistakes, and staffing I suspect is a big part of their problem. There are other places outside London that might have the labour market to support a public body that wants a deep pool of talent, like Manchester or Leeds or Edinburgh. But they also have expensive housing markets. If you want good people you need a deep labour market which implies good private sector employers which implies high competitor salaries and expensive housing, sorry.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
Setting aside the poke at Francis, that is a classic.
...Crucial information, recorded on different systems by various authorities, was "lost" in handovers between staff, Mr Russell added...
...This is a report that cannot be allowed to gather dust...
...A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "These were horrendous crimes and we have apologised to the victims for the unacceptable failings in this case. "We have greatly improved information sharing between prisons and probation officers and all probation staff have received new, mandatory training on when offenders should be recalled." The second part of the review is due to be published in the autumn...
Half a decade on, what has changed ?
Realistically, who wants to be a prison officer? I'm sure there are some good ones who ended there by chance but it is disproportionately going to be a mix of people who don't care where they work (and by extension unlikely to care about work), sadists, those on a power trip who wouldn't get power elsewhere, and those without much choice.
Even if we made it well paid and resourced it properly, I'd expect management to be patchy and inconsistent. Given we make it harder and harder for prison officers, don't reward them well and leave prisons massively overcrowded I am surprised they function at all.
One of my nieces is a Prison Officer. Been in the Prison Service about 20 years now; originally wanted to join the Police, but (IIRC) eyesight wasn't quite good enough. She's in the situation now whereby, were she to leave, she'd forfeit further pension accruals and she'd be unlikely to get another job where she could get to retire 'soon'. She describes the job as getting harder over the past few years (not just the last one!) and the amount of violence increasing.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Background Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then.
Methods A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system.
Results Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital.
Conclusion In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver.
And from the conclusion:
Choice is only meaningful if there are realistic options and an experience of choice. We suggest our results reveal both a symptom and a cause: the lack of experienced choice may be a symptom of a lack of meaningful choice in the system, while aspects of the system's design may cause patients to experience less choice than intended. Our results paint a different picture to the case studies on the Choose and Book website [36]. While our findings about Choose and Book need replicating, they more generally match prior studies showing the public is not experiencing the intent of UK government policy on choice [17, 37]. Consumerist models of choice driving quality improvements fail if patients are not exercising that choice. Understanding the discordance between experience and policy intent is crucial to the success of the patient choice agenda. We suggest that consideration needs to be given as to whether choice of hospital should be the focus of patient choice and whether the nature of NHS services, or healthcare services in general, are such that a meaningful choice of place, date and time can ever be delivered.
Choose and Book doesn't work for two reasons.
1) proper choice requires an informed consumer, who knows better than a professional who is the best person or place to be seen for their condition.
2) spare capacity, so there are appointments to be had.
Neither really exist except for the most straightforward conditions.
Patient choice allowed my partner to get a different doctor than the one who spent her entire appointment talking at me.
I'm not saying patient choice is bad. I'm saying a specific system, Choose and Book, that supposedly increased patient choice doesn't actually do that.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
As you probably know yourself, it is extraordinarily hard to change anything significantly, as an elected politician. Firstly, political roles with any influence come with a stack of work just to keep plates spinning (the extent to which officials are adept at keeping their politicians 'busy' with the minor stuff, per Yes Minister, one can debate). Then, you have to have the influence within your own political party - assuming it has a majority - to persuade your colleagues both of the need for change and to give it political priority, when there are always more things to do than capacity to do them. Any change of significance will come with up front costs, risks, and political consequences, with the benefits often way downstream - quite possibly when you're out of office and some other guy or gal will be in your chair, which makes it hard to sell politically, both to colleagues and then to the wider world. Your staff are already overworked and highly skilled, as an understandable self-protection, at putting obstacles in the way of anything that will be time-consuming and risky, since their careers as well as your own are likely on the line if anything goes really tits up. Anyone in a senior position, especially in the public sector, knows that the 'power' such roles appear to have is largely illusory, given the array of stakeholders and vested interests that need to be got on board and the lack of resources, human, physical and financial. It takes exceptional drive to push through all of this, and it's almost a golden rule that any politician can only push one such project at a time, the delivery of which could easily take years. You need a firm ally among senior staff, since as a politician - whether minister or councillor - you don't have much formal power to manage or issue direct orders to staff yourself. And you're doing all this in a world where many of your colleagues are risk-averse time-servers who just want to stay in their big chairs, with others supposedly on your side actually hoping you'll mess up so they can take your job, and surrounded by political opponents whose principal interest is in seeing you fail.
This is a very good picture of the reality in a multi party democratic large country with big institutions, huge civil admin and a free press. In many ways none of it is new. It is the basic condition of what being the government is like.
None of it justifies an absence of basic competence in running what the state has taken on itself to run and requires us to pay for. By far the biggest change needed is to run what there already is really well. HMRC answering the phone within two minutes and dealing with queries properly. Not releasing prisoners wrongly. Following up knife stabbings properly. Attending shop lifting and burglaries and prosecuting offenders. No change required, just competence.
No, it can't be done on the cheap. But incompetence costs as much.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Background Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then.
Methods A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system.
Results Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital.
Conclusion In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver.
And from the conclusion:
Choice is only meaningful if there are realistic options and an experience of choice. We suggest our results reveal both a symptom and a cause: the lack of experienced choice may be a symptom of a lack of meaningful choice in the system, while aspects of the system's design may cause patients to experience less choice than intended. Our results paint a different picture to the case studies on the Choose and Book website [36]. While our findings about Choose and Book need replicating, they more generally match prior studies showing the public is not experiencing the intent of UK government policy on choice [17, 37]. Consumerist models of choice driving quality improvements fail if patients are not exercising that choice. Understanding the discordance between experience and policy intent is crucial to the success of the patient choice agenda. We suggest that consideration needs to be given as to whether choice of hospital should be the focus of patient choice and whether the nature of NHS services, or healthcare services in general, are such that a meaningful choice of place, date and time can ever be delivered.
Choose and Book doesn't work for two reasons.
1) proper choice requires an informed consumer, who knows better than a professional who is the best person or place to be seen for their condition.
2) spare capacity, so there are appointments to be had.
Neither really exist except for the most straightforward conditions.
Patient choice allowed my partner to get a different doctor than the one who spent her entire appointment talking at me.
What a weird consultation! Any idea why?
Forgive me for my vagueness, but he was an overseas doctor and I expect it's because he thought I'd browbeat her into following his preferred valid medical route rather than the also valid medical route she wanted. Patient choice and the ability to reject a doctor saved her from that situation.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
Surely it’s a simple process? Prisoner arrives from court and is “checked in”. Papers from court confirm release date. Release date is put into prison system on the Prisoner’s page with name, details and photo.
Prison receives written instructions from MoJ etc to confirm if prisoner is being released early - get prisoner from cell, check they are the same person as the system shows from check-in, release.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, prison system checked and the date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm in writing that its correct and he is being released earlier.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, system checked and date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm, MoJ say no, prisoner is not being released early so a mistake, prisoner goes back to cell.
It's usually more complicated than that. I was talking to a friend in the Prion Service about this - it isn't the 'end of sentence' releases that are the problem (they know when they are, exactly as you describe). it's when something changes, usually because of the end of a court case when someone has been on remand. Are they in for another offence? What has the court sentenced them to? To run concurrently or consecutively? How long have they already served? etc etc. Then often the instructions from the court are misleading or even wrong (another overstretched, under-resourced and underpaid environment prone to making mistakes).There is also Probation who often do daft things like insist on the prisoner reporting to their home office at 9:30 in the morning 300 miles away when they're being released from the middle of nowhere and there isn't a train until the morning
And then if they are non-UK Nationals they also have to check with Immigration, which means the dead hand of the Home Office.
And all this happens at 4:30 in the afternoon because that's when the courts get round to sending the paperwork out.
The other source of error is because the prisons are all full, often people are in the wrong one temporarily to balance out numbers so there are a lot of moves taking place all the time it's easier than you think to make mistakes.
So as is often the case, what seems easy, isn't.
Stick to the bottom line here - soon as Labour got into power and saying too many people locked up too long, in other words Labour on side of criminals not victims, has there been an explosion of manhunts for mistaken release or not?
I’m pleased the media have stopped trying to pretend it just one or two, and now asking just how many unsolved manhunts due to early release do the police have outstanding at the moment - that is the only question to be answered and put into headlines right now.
Not. The rapid rise started in 2022 according to the statistics. Around the same time that the prison system went to the point of needing prayer to stop it collapsing.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
Surely it’s a simple process? Prisoner arrives from court and is “checked in”. Papers from court confirm release date. Release date is put into prison system on the Prisoner’s page with name, details and photo.
Prison receives written instructions from MoJ etc to confirm if prisoner is being released early - get prisoner from cell, check they are the same person as the system shows from check-in, release.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, prison system checked and the date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm in writing that its correct and he is being released earlier.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, system checked and date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm, MoJ say no, prisoner is not being released early so a mistake, prisoner goes back to cell.
It's usually more complicated than that. I was talking to a friend in the Prion Service about this - it isn't the 'end of sentence' releases that are the problem (they know when they are, exactly as you describe). it's when something changes, usually because of the end of a court case when someone has been on remand. Are they in for another offence? What has the court sentenced them to? To run concurrently or consecutively? How long have they already served? etc etc. Then often the instructions from the court are misleading or even wrong (another overstretched, under-resourced and underpaid environment prone to making mistakes).There is also Probation who often do daft things like insist on the prisoner reporting to their home office at 9:30 in the morning 300 miles away when they're being released from the middle of nowhere and there isn't a train until the morning
And then if they are non-UK Nationals they also have to check with Immigration, which means the dead hand of the Home Office.
And all this happens at 4:30 in the afternoon because that's when the courts get round to sending the paperwork out.
The other source of error is because the prisons are all full, often people are in the wrong one temporarily to balance out numbers so there are a lot of moves taking place all the time it's easier than you think to make mistakes.
So as is often the case, what seems easy, isn't.
You're right, its not easy, but people need to take accountability and if mistakes are made then the system needs fixing.
Healthcare is comparatively complex and overworked but a nurse who gave medicine to the wrong patient (like prisons are releasing the wrong people) could face being struck off and losing their career.
If people don't care and just do whatever because there's no accountability then mistakes are more likely.
I think it would be unusual for a nurse to be struck off for giving medicine to the wrong patient once, unless it led to a very serious outcome. And more prison officers go to jail for misconduct than nurses!
Healthcare is complex and medical errors happen all the time!
There's a huge amount of effort and research into preventing errors. When I was last in hospital (for the best part of 5 weeks) it was mildly amusing to the see the double checking of who the patient is and the medication. But thats about avoiding mistakes.
And incidentally bad mistakes DO happen. During monitoring of my remission from leukeamia I had 3 monthly bone marrow samples taken. On one ocassion a locum doctor took the sample and sent it to the wrong place (Bristol rather than Professor Grimwade's lab in London). Result - I was called in again that same week for a second sampling... Not fun.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
And then because they can't fill those £50k manager posts, they fill them instead with people like me (and I assume, you) paying £1000 a day to an IT Consultancy who skim off much of that so it costs twice as much as it would do to employ someone directly at the market rate.
(And £50k has to be the absolute minimum salary for anything in London, as you will pay most of that in rent and travel)
As I already pointed out to you, £50k is ABOVE the median salary in London so most Londoners are already paying most of their salaries in rent and travel. Hence most London residents almost always vote Labour and more live in social homes and most rent.
The most sensible London workers by middle age have moved out to the home counties, here in Essex for example you can earn a London salary with half the living costs and buy a property far cheaper in most areas. Hence even in 2024 most of Essex did not vote Labour
To be pedantic in 2024 the overwhelming majority of the country did not vote for Labour.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Background Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then.
Methods A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system.
Results Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital.
Conclusion In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver.
And from the conclusion:
Choice is only meaningful if there are realistic options and an experience of choice. We suggest our results reveal both a symptom and a cause: the lack of experienced choice may be a symptom of a lack of meaningful choice in the system, while aspects of the system's design may cause patients to experience less choice than intended. Our results paint a different picture to the case studies on the Choose and Book website [36]. While our findings about Choose and Book need replicating, they more generally match prior studies showing the public is not experiencing the intent of UK government policy on choice [17, 37]. Consumerist models of choice driving quality improvements fail if patients are not exercising that choice. Understanding the discordance between experience and policy intent is crucial to the success of the patient choice agenda. We suggest that consideration needs to be given as to whether choice of hospital should be the focus of patient choice and whether the nature of NHS services, or healthcare services in general, are such that a meaningful choice of place, date and time can ever be delivered.
Choose and Book doesn't work for two reasons.
1) proper choice requires an informed consumer, who knows better than a professional who is the best person or place to be seen for their condition.
2) spare capacity, so there are appointments to be had.
Neither really exist except for the most straightforward conditions.
Patient choice allowed my partner to get a different doctor than the one who spent her entire appointment talking at me.
What a weird consultation! Any idea why?
Forgive me for my vagueness, but he was an overseas doctor and I expect it's because he thought I'd browbeat her into following his preferred valid medical route rather than the also valid medical route she wanted. Patient choice and the ability to reject a doctor saved her from that situation.
Sure, and that is a good thing. That sort of patient choice is not what the NHS "Choose and Book" interface does. It gives you a choice of five options, but these are by location, not by Dr. It doesnt give you a choice between the saintly Dr Foxy and Dr Evil.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
It is an outrage and a sign that the justice system is in chaos and Lammy needs to get a grip.
Nonetheless the pretence that this is a post July 2024 (although as the emergency release programme has been implemented the frequency has increased twofold) phenomenon by Shadow Ministers and PBers demonstrates a remarkably short memory.
I don't recall you outrage posting about this trifling error back in 2019/20. Perhaps you would have been perfectly entitled so to do and the government of the day would have got a grip then.
As fun as the political blame is (and it IS fun pointing out that the Tories fucked the country), we need to get away from being that Spiderman meme and do things differently.
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
Except that the NHS is remarkably efficient (or as another poster put it frugal) compared to other equivalent nations healthcare systems. The idea that the NHS is somehow drowning in admin is ridiculous. And giving patients a choice of hospitals doesn't require a shiny new admin building.
People often accuse reform voters/supporters of harking back to the past. In a way your version of the NHS is doing the same thing. People get frustrated with how GP surgeries run. I think they fail to understand the pressures on primary care. The huge increase in people over 65 in the last quarter century. The ever increase in things that we can do (hip, knee replacement seen as commonplace). Back in the 80's you would probably have walked into the GP surgery, collected a number (like the old delicounter in the supermarket) and waited your turn. I think a lot of people still want to do that. But is it the best way to run a surgery?
I don't actually disagree re hospitals, but what is really needed is the older cottage hospitals. Essentially well but infirm elderly patients evicted from the main surgical hospitals and out to their own home towns, near their families and friends. Less care needed, but still need looking after.
My question then is if the NHS is remarkably efficient, why is it so catastrophically inefficient? If giving people choice doesn't require a shiny new admin building, why does it always require one in practice?
I'm not harking back to the past at all - I've said that we could have booking systems that work as another poster asked for. But you can't have that at the moment because of the absurd structure.
One example. Where I used to live. Two separate GP practices in the same health centre. Each with its own management team, its own contracts with other parts of the NHS, its own preferred treatment routes. Duplication. Complication. Cost. And for what choice? You get a GP at the one with capacity - there's no choice. You get sent where they send you. Teesside has a choice of ageing hospitals short on capacity. Work in Newcastle and an appointment there would suit you better? Tough.
Radical idea. Scrap the GP practices managing contracts to compete with each other. Scrap the market structure completely. Procure centrally. Your choice of hospital is almost certainly your closest one because thats what people want, but if you want to drop an appointment into the one near where you work or you have family its click click. Centralised.
My daughter recently divorced her husband and has bought a home nearby
It is extraordinary how bad most everyone has been in the process from the divorce lawyers, to the conveyancers, to the utility services, to the local council, and to Welsh Water who knew her water meter had been buried in road works two years previously and have not exposed it since
I do not like the word broken Britain but sadly it is and I see little prospects of any improvement soon
The prisons still use paper with no computerised records as WIfi is not available apparently
Of course the collapse of the prison and courts happened under successive governments alongside so much more, but ultimately we expect to pour countless billions into a failing NHS with little or no reform, pensions and benefits are out of control, paying interest on our debt of £100 billion pa, etc and we wonder why we are where we are
Labour's answer is to tax and tax everything in sight, hand out billions more on WFP, triple lock, and now abolitioning the 2 child cap.
This has to stop and radical action is required to change the direction of the economy but nobody is brave enough as they perceive the public will not elect them
Ultimately this only ends up one way and that is the IMF intervening
And to those who blame the 'other lot' each lot is to blame and no political party is any better than the other at facing realism
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
Why any public sector is based in London is beyond me.
All public sector work, beyond frontline services, should be moved out of overheated and overexpensive London. Move all civil servants elsewhere.
I'd move Parliament and the PM's office too while we're at it.
I think the experience of the ONS, based in Newport, offers a cautionary tale. It's hard to get good people to move to Newport, where there are few other employers of graduates with advanced skills in the area of data and statistics. Once you're there and have kids in school and put down roots you have no other job to go to. Your spouse might not find good work either. The ONS has been bedeviled by problems and mistakes, and staffing I suspect is a big part of their problem. There are other places outside London that might have the labour market to support a public body that wants a deep pool of talent, like Manchester or Leeds or Edinburgh. But they also have expensive housing markets. If you want good people you need a deep labour market which implies good private sector employers which implies high competitor salaries and expensive housing, sorry.
The move of the ONS to Newport has indeed been an exercise in how to do relocation badly. Also it is a shithole, so no chance getting people to trade the above for a nice place to live and a bigger house (which actually removes some of the need for career progression)
I was once involved with a move from London to Coventry and was slightly surprised by how many of my colleagues wanted to move. Well, lower living costs, opportunity to buy a big family house without a massive commute, plenty of housing at different price ranges, you can live in Stratford upon Avon if you can afford it. Only an hour from London by train, and it was an education quango so many spouses were teachers, and you can get a job anywhere.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
Surely it’s a simple process? Prisoner arrives from court and is “checked in”. Papers from court confirm release date. Release date is put into prison system on the Prisoner’s page with name, details and photo.
Prison receives written instructions from MoJ etc to confirm if prisoner is being released early - get prisoner from cell, check they are the same person as the system shows from check-in, release.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, prison system checked and the date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm in writing that its correct and he is being released earlier.
Prisoner arrives at check-out for release, system checked and date doesn’t align with prisoner detail on system, prisoner has to wait until MoJ confirm, MoJ say no, prisoner is not being released early so a mistake, prisoner goes back to cell.
It's usually more complicated than that. I was talking to a friend in the Prion Service about this - it isn't the 'end of sentence' releases that are the problem (they know when they are, exactly as you describe). it's when something changes, usually because of the end of a court case when someone has been on remand. Are they in for another offence? What has the court sentenced them to? To run concurrently or consecutively? How long have they already served? etc etc. Then often the instructions from the court are misleading or even wrong (another overstretched, under-resourced and underpaid environment prone to making mistakes).There is also Probation who often do daft things like insist on the prisoner reporting to their home office at 9:30 in the morning 300 miles away when they're being released from the middle of nowhere and there isn't a train until the morning
And then if they are non-UK Nationals they also have to check with Immigration, which means the dead hand of the Home Office.
And all this happens at 4:30 in the afternoon because that's when the courts get round to sending the paperwork out.
The other source of error is because the prisons are all full, often people are in the wrong one temporarily to balance out numbers so there are a lot of moves taking place all the time it's easier than you think to make mistakes.
So as is often the case, what seems easy, isn't.
Stick to the bottom line here - soon as Labour got into power and saying too many people locked up too long, in other words Labour on side of criminals not victims, has there been an explosion of manhunts for mistaken release or not?
I’m pleased the media have stopped trying to pretend it just one or two, and now asking just how many unsolved manhunts due to early release do the police have outstanding at the moment - that is the only question to be answered and put into headlines right now.
Not. The rapid rise started in 2022 according to the statistics. Around the same time that the prison system went to the point of needing prayer to stop it collapsing.
Exactly, Labour didn't decide that "people were being locked up too long" they took power only to discover that prisons were literally full, probably one of a number of reasons that Rishi had cut and run, and had to start an emergency early release programme. Unsurprisingly this has resulted in errors, but the root of the problem is the negligence of the previous government.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
And then because they can't fill those £50k manager posts, they fill them instead with people like me (and I assume, you) paying £1000 a day to an IT Consultancy who skim off much of that so it costs twice as much as it would do to employ someone directly at the market rate.
(And £50k has to be the absolute minimum salary for anything in London, as you will pay most of that in rent and travel)
As I already pointed out to you, £50k is ABOVE the median salary in London so most Londoners are already paying most of their salaries in rent and travel. Hence most London residents almost always vote Labour and more live in social homes and most rent.
The most sensible London workers by middle age have moved out to the home counties, here in Essex for example you can earn a London salary with half the living costs and buy a property far cheaper in most areas. Hence even in 2024 most of Essex did not vote Labour
To be pedantic in 2024 the overwhelming majority of the country did not vote for Labour.
In seat terms though the overwhelming majority of the country did vote Labour, with Labour winning 411 MPs out of 650.
In Essex though Labour still only won 5 out of 18 MPs
Totally agree. The sooner we junk that pile of crap X from UK servers the better.
I never use it. I hate it. Any link with an X prefix I just ignore. My life is none the poorer for it.
X has a clear use. Matt cartoons free. PB posters linking to X, used selectively, is the best filter available to me. Are there other uses?
I still gain a lot of specalist knowledge from posts on X. But my follower list is carefully curated and I stay well clear of any politic type posters, and thus doesn't contain ragebaity stuff.
That’s the key, don’t actually follow a lot of people who comment on politics. My feed is all IT/aviation/motorsport/space/technology/Ukraine stuff unless I go looking for UK or US politics.
We can tell by your level-headed analyses of US politics that don't suggest, in any way, that you've fallen down a MAGA social media hole.
Thats how it works. Those down a rabbit hole don't know that they are down it.
The alogarithims pushing different views are very much more powerful and sinister than the Murdoch press of the nineties.
What irks me the most is I think most of the money will be pissed up the wall.
I think the triple-lock, PIPs for hundreds of thousands of people who've fallen out of the habit of working post Covid, winter fuel allowance, and indulgences, like private cabs, for shuttling around those on adult social care are a terrible use of public funds.
This. Very much this. What is the point in raising more taxes to throw onto the bonfire?
We can't afford the faux-market structures inside the NHS and Education. Waste, duplication, inefficiency and a system that despite all that still doesn't have the capacity to offer market choice. Scrap it all. We can't afford the cost of cleaning up the mess from cuts. The taxis you mention are what happens when government dumps responsibility on councils but doesn't fund it. Taxis should be an emergency measure but ends up the default because there isn't any money to put alternatives in place.
And I could go on. We need significant reform of the way we do services - cutting the structure and the spending to improve the provision.
I have to ask - what the hell is government spending our money on? They stopped funding so many things - universities, councils, adult social care etc - yet we have record taxes and enormous debt.
Somewhere in the Yes, Minister canon, there is a Sir Humphrey line about "doing things more efficiently costs more".
It's played for laughs, and is meant as a joke about the madness of the Civil Service. But in certain situations, it's true. The British State right now is largely suffering from the converse of that line- trying to do things cheaply is very inefficient. We have tried to do things cheaply for a generation and now it has caught up with us. It was always going to in the end.
Ninety violent or sex offenders have been mistakenly released from prison in the last year,
Your joking, not another one 90....
The prison service appears to be totally broken. They literally have one job to do, and that’s to keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us.
How can they possibly lose half a dozen people every week?
Because prisons are overcrowded, guards are undertrained with few entry requirements snd administrative systems archaic. We have neglected our prisons as much as anywhere else in the public estate so shouldn't be surprised that they work badly. The Probation service is pretty hopeless too. At £60 000 per prisoner per year it is very much as Douglas Hurd described 30 years ago "an expensive way of making bad people worse".
On a recent inspection at Leicester Prison* the governor didn't know how many prisoners he had that day. A pretty core figure I would have thought.
*Leicester Prison is opposite my hospital and particularly chaotic, as it is short term with lots of remand prisoners and newly sentenced who are awaiting moves to longer term prisons.
I’ve not worked in a prison but I have worked in an hotel - how many customers are in beds tonight is kinda a key metric. Much easier with a prison too, guests can’t just bring a friend in with them and there’s supposed to be paperwork of comings and goings.
As others have said, it does appear that a lot of money is being spent with poor value achieved, yet prison officers are not particularly well paid, and every month or two there’s a scandal involving a young woman working in a men’s prison with predictable results.
The building themselves are often in poor condition too, they should probably look at selling off a lot of the estate that’s in urban areas (the old prison in Oxford city centre is now a funky hotel) and build new facilities on military land.
Public sector pay is one of those magic bullets I very much wish we could use. In a perfect world I would very much like that our public servants were paid much better than they are and payscales significantly reformed so that progression is encouraged. We should as part of that be reforming public sector pensions.
Of course the unions would hate absolutely everything I’ve just typed so it’s pie in the sky, but I can dream. I think there’s a lot of great people in the public sector but they are trapped by overbearing bureaucracy and static pay and progression structures.
They probably need fewer people paid more money, and yes get rid of the archaic systems of work and pensions.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
And then because they can't fill those £50k manager posts, they fill them instead with people like me (and I assume, you) paying £1000 a day to an IT Consultancy who skim off much of that so it costs twice as much as it would do to employ someone directly at the market rate.
(And £50k has to be the absolute minimum salary for anything in London, as you will pay most of that in rent and travel)
As I already pointed out to you, £50k is ABOVE the median salary in London so most Londoners are already paying most of their salaries in rent and travel. Hence most London residents almost always vote Labour and more live in social homes and most rent.
The most sensible London workers by middle age have moved out to the home counties, here in Essex for example you can earn a London salary with half the living costs and buy a property far cheaper in most areas. Hence even in 2024 most of Essex did not vote Labour
To be pedantic in 2024 the overwhelming majority of the country did not vote for Labour.
In seat terms though the overwhelming majority of the country did vote Labour, with Labour winning 411 MPs out of 650.
In Essex though Labour still only won 5 out of 18 MPs
In seat terms yes. But when quantifying “who voted Labour in 2024” - that was 33.7% of those who voted. So of those who voted 66.3% did not vote Labour.
Comments
Yes Minister was so funny because it was true. We change the government but not the system. Neither side seems capable of imagining that "choice" is waste.
Offer people the following. You have a local GP. You have an accessible local hospital for basic bits and regional centres of excellence to do the complex / difficult stuff. You get seen quickly and treated and home without being left to suffer in pain for endless months and years.
Nobody cares about GPs being asked to create and administer clinical commissioning. A choice of hospitals. A shiny new admin building full of people telling you that your pain will be with you for another 18 months.
For all the successive governments rightly claim to be spending record amounts on the NHS, they're spending it on admin, not healthcare. Massively simplify the structure to cut much of the admin, and thus more cash spent on fixing your ailment and less on letters passed from pillar to post explaining why they won't treat you until Christmas next year.
It’s really obvious in my trade, IT, when you see ads for senior IT managers on £50k in the public sector in London, with a long list of formal qualifications as prerequisites and a five-stage application process.
The helpdesk Level 2 in the private sector is making that salary in London.
N.B. My dig at Urquhart was unnecessary.
Just spending more on something does not equate to improvement, it can in some cases dramatically reduce productivity. The public sector is exceptionally vulnerable to this because it can be difficult to quantify what is a beneficial outcome. The private sector is not immune to it, but they do at the end of the day have a bottom line and can self correct. The self correction in the public sector is harder because you can defy there is a problem longer.
The service would probably have been run by the local authority; now it's likely a private provider paid by the LA.
I can't find figures for the cost of a child in care back then, but I do know that that cost has nearly doubled in the last five years alone.
John Rentoul
@JohnRentoul
·
7m
This game is getting silly now. Live Aid was closer to the end of WW2 than to the present day
https://x.com/JohnRentoul/status/1986717406354354395
Background
Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then.
Methods
A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system.
Results
Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital.
Conclusion
In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver.
And from the conclusion:
Choice is only meaningful if there are realistic options and an experience of choice. We suggest our results reveal both a symptom and a cause: the lack of experienced choice may be a symptom of a lack of meaningful choice in the system, while aspects of the system's design may cause patients to experience less choice than intended.
Our results paint a different picture to the case studies on the Choose and Book website [36]. While our findings about Choose and Book need replicating, they more generally match prior studies showing the public is not experiencing the intent of UK government policy on choice [17, 37]. Consumerist models of choice driving quality improvements fail if patients are not exercising that choice. Understanding the discordance between experience and policy intent is crucial to the success of the patient choice agenda. We suggest that consideration needs to be given as to whether choice of hospital should be the focus of patient choice and whether the nature of NHS services, or healthcare services in general, are such that a meaningful choice of place, date and time can ever be delivered.
The British Library systems relate to running a large organisation, with a large inventory.
That’s always complex.
An important thing with IT is continuously replacing bits - it should be Trigger’s Broom.
Instead of steadily improving it, successive directors of the BL declared that IT wasn’t a “core function”*. Since this meant outsourcing, this made actually changing stuff really hard and expensive.
So grand, expensive projects were suggested, but never funded.
The nut and bolts replacement work didn’t happen.
The staff they had, were left to muddle on.
So, when they were attacked, the systems were archaic and insecure. Worst of all, the attackers went after infrastructure - they destroyed the systems themselves.
So the British Library has the *data*, but it is basically impossible to reconstruct the systems it ran on. They were full of fixes and undocumented changes - in many cases, the software is no longer available.
The British Library is trying to build a *completely new system*.
*Since reproduction isn’t a core function of Directors of the British Library, I propose a reduction in reproductive capability.
Even if we made it well paid and resourced it properly, I'd expect management to be patchy and inconsistent. Given we make it harder and harder for prison officers, don't reward them well and leave prisons massively overcrowded I am surprised they function at all.
£50k is in top 20 percentile of income in the UK, not a bad salary (IFS gives the 80th percentile as being £46,485 in 2024), whereas in the North East of England it would be in the top 10 percentile. Source: https://ifs.org.uk/inequality/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Geographical-inequalities-in-the-UK-how-they-have-changed-1
All public sector work, beyond frontline services, should be moved out of overheated and overexpensive London. Move all civil servants elsewhere.
I'd move Parliament and the PM's office too while we're at it.
People who are not a danger to others should be given community punishments rather than imprisoned, and there should be more support for those leaving prison.
The current prisons minister, to his enormous credit, has a long history of supporting those who were formerly incarcerated.
It has been widely reported that here is serious concerns that clean skins for organised crime are now well embedded across the system. The undercover documentaries over the past few years have shown up how poor the background checks where journalists have been able to really easily get jobs without using fake names (or that documentary makers have had to recruit existing employees).
A lot is made about the cost of old-age care for councils, but don't ignore child and adult social care . It remains a very large proportion of budgets.
But it does require a ruthless determination to weed out the stuff designed to wind up or outrage. You can mute entire topics as well as individuals, so it's not that hard.
Allied to a bit of effort finding the stuff you do want to follow, and it's preferable to most news sites.
But I'd agree that 90% or more of what it offers is utterly toxic.
@thehistoryguy.bsky.social
If we are willing to pay lots of money to have a super capable machine in our homes controlled by Elon Musk we actually don’t deserve to survive as a species.
It’s very difficult for an institution to adapt to public need if there’s a bean counter somewhere who needs 50 authorisations and impact assessments to create a new role at a particular pay grade, with every budget meeting stressing the need for “pay restraint” rather than looking at waste and deregulation. There’s plenty of decent, hardworking people who’ve worked in the public sector long enough to be great managers and administrators who know what is needed, who are held back because there’s “no vacancy” above them and no way of the organisation adapting to their strengths, or who are subjected to the merry go round of chief execs on inflated pay being parachuted in from other sectors to deliver little practical benefit or change. So those people lose their ambitions and they get stuck.
The much derided Bluesky gives me everything I need in terms of politics data so I usually stick to that.
But you are right, there is no such thing as a friendly chat especially around these issues. Written communication does not have the same free speech protection that spoken has, and it can be incredibly easy to fall foul of actions that wouldnt get you in trouble in person.
"So what did you mean when you said that you think foreign murdering criminals should get a taste of their own medicine? What was going through your mind? Did you think it would upset people? Isnt that what you do for a living? Did you want justice for the people who got hurt? Did you think that the person being foreign means they deserve to be hurt also? Did you want to make foreign people anxious?"
Just enough to hang yourself. Almost everyone caught on what would be called free speech crimes over the last few years have hanged themselves in interview.
1) keep people locked up
2) keep prison staff safe
3) keep locked up people fed, looked after and not killing each other
4) try to prepare them for reintroduction to society/rehabilitate
Arguably they're failing at all of them.
I do get frustrated when Shadow Ministers lie and explain everything was hunky dory on their watch. There are Tories who acknowledge reality, Alex Chalke was on yesterday suggesting the prison system has been in crisis for years if not decades. Contrast that with Jenrick on Ferrari yesterday, who with a half truth blamed not only the current but the previous government for the collapse in asylum policy and the related collapse in prison management. But along with that half truth he distanced himself from the previous government by saying he resigned because they were all incompetent, ignoring the reality that he was front and centre of that incompetence.
Incumbency brings with it the reality of government and this lot need to pull their finger out or hand the show over to Farage sooner rather than later. But Kemi, Cartridge and Jenrick pretending they weren't in government as the whole edifice collapsed does stick in the craw.
The reality is unitary councils and what's left of county councils are really just Children's & Adult social care providers with the rest of the council a bolt on. This is doubly so when you need to squeeze down the costs of the bolt on because the Children's services budget is £10s of millions over spent, each year, even when you keep increasing it.
And then if they are non-UK Nationals they also have to check with Immigration, which means the dead hand of the Home Office.
And all this happens at 4:30 in the afternoon because that's when the courts get round to sending the paperwork out.
The other source of error is because the prisons are all full, often people are in the wrong one temporarily to balance out numbers so there are a lot of moves taking place all the time it's easier than you think to make mistakes.
So as is often the case, what seems easy, isn't.
They’re way better off just buying something off-the-shelf, but no doubt it ends up like military procurement where they have to do something obvious in a special way, just because they always have - because that’s how the old system worked!
The Amazon punter doesnt know (or care) how they can order something at 11:30pm and it is delivered by 10am, they just click on the buy now. But that doesnt mean what sits behind it is a simple process.
Green did make some fair comments on Pelosi though, she was one of the most effective Speakers in history in terms of getting legislation passed and led her party to a majority in the House in 4 elections
Healthcare is comparatively complex and overworked but a nurse who gave medicine to the wrong patient (like prisons are releasing the wrong people) could face being struck off and losing their career.
If people don't care and just do whatever because there's no accountability then mistakes are more likely.
1) proper choice requires an informed consumer, who knows better than a professional who is the best person or place to be seen for their condition.
2) spare capacity, so there are appointments to be had.
Neither really exist except for the most straightforward conditions.
Footy kicks off at 16:30 UK time and the F1 cars start racing at 17:00.
I think MTG has at least TWO holes in her head, not one, if we are to take a charitable view, and her account that she was a cosmic victim (not my inclination).
One is that she is a gullible for some of the most poisonous and crazy ideological and political ideas that we see anywhere.
The second that she has no sense of judgement or underlying values and principles with which to evaluate those crazed ideas.
To my mind, the best comparison for such would be David Icke.
But I think she is malignant not benign.
Anyway, the problem is simple. We need to change the systems and simplify the structures. Which costs more as you do it, and we're "broke" supposedly.
In the business world this is called investment. My shop had very inefficient florescent light fittings. Cost a LOT in electricity. So I invested in LED panels. Spend more up front, to then save a lot every month that follows. Borrow. Invest. Gain a return on the investment. CAPITALISM - that thing the Tories used to represent before they got bought by the banks and the spivs.
Will it cost a little more to scrap these structures and cut the now redundant workforce? Sure. With huge savings delivered afterwards. Will it cost more to hire more cops and run the courts more and create prison space? Absolutely - with a big drop in the cost of crime afterwards. Will it cost money to invest in our towns and cities so that the streets aren't full of weeds and potholes? Sure - but look at the economic growth in places like Manchester.
Borrow. Invest. ROI.
Thanks to the Tories all we ever get - from Labour as well who were forced to adopt the same language - is "how will you pay for that", not "what benefits do we get from that". And at the moment absurd political / treasury orthodoxy has it that cuts save money with no cost. Which is laughably untrue.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/416139/full-time-annual-salary-in-the-uk-by-region/#:~:text=Showing entries 1 to 13,Kingdom in 2024, by region
Give Lisa Nandy a bung, Lisa Nandy appoints you to something - how is this not gold standard corruption? It’s surely the very definition of corrupt regime, corrupt moneymaking cronyism.
(And £50k has to be the absolute minimum salary for anything in London, as you will pay most of that in rent and travel)
Where is the efficiency in fragmenting the structure so that instead of centralised buying power you let each individual outlet do it?
I gave you IT procurement as an example, let me give you another - catering. The cost for the foodservice industry to trade and supply individual trusts and schools is vastly more than via the LEA. So the deal offered is worse because scale produces efficiencies and lower prices, and the higher operating cost is added.
In the private sector you add scale and cut duplication. In the public sector we do the opposite. No wonder we are broke.
You rightly point at Manchester, IMO, as I suspect it's entirely possible that sustained capital investment in regional cities would provide a greater return than that in London, which has taken the lion's share since forever.
Not enough cops, not enough CPS capacity, courts can't process cases, prisons are full, early release needed.
And then you get privatised contracted and subcontracted services where people who are poorly trained and demoralised get to make decisions with wrong or missing information.
If we spent on the front line we would have prison capacity and staff who know what they are doing.
I’m pleased the media have stopped trying to pretend it just one or two, and now asking just how many unsolved manhunts due to early release do the police have outstanding at the moment - that is the only question to be answered and put into headlines right now.
I do wonder whether somewhere in the Tory brain, perhaps Dominic Cummings, the idea was hatched that if welfare is "spaffed" around to such an egregious extent under the Tory watch that the clamour to get rid of welfare safety net altogether for whoever came next was the aim. The idea that you are entitled to a Motability BMW M5 if you feel sad is the culmination, and that happened on the Tory Watch.
Yes they’ll pay $BigConsultancy a bag of sand a day, who’ll pay their contractor £600 which is the actual going rate for the job. They could probably hire the contractor directly for £80k, but he doesn’t have all the right pieces of paper to pass the first sift of CVs.
Give me a website and let me book a time and venue that suits me. It may still be six months ahead but the likelihood I can make it is massively increased.
And for some reason I can only be treated near where I live. Now I understand some people want or need to be treated locally but why not use those of us more mobile to average out demand on a regional or national basis?
People often accuse reform voters/supporters of harking back to the past. In a way your version of the NHS is doing the same thing. People get frustrated with how GP surgeries run. I think they fail to understand the pressures on primary care. The huge increase in people over 65 in the last quarter century. The ever increase in things that we can do (hip, knee replacement seen as commonplace). Back in the 80's you would probably have walked into the GP surgery, collected a number (like the old delicounter in the supermarket) and waited your turn. I think a lot of people still want to do that. But is it the best way to run a surgery?
I don't actually disagree re hospitals, but what is really needed is the older cottage hospitals. Essentially well but infirm elderly patients evicted from the main surgical hospitals and out to their own home towns, near their families and friends. Less care needed, but still need looking after.
I was looking, because why not, at the 6 Music Artists of the Year 2025 and readers will be thrilled to hear that of the seven solo artists (Ethel Cain, FKA Twigs, Jacob Alon, jasmine.4.t, Kae Tempest, CMAT, Blood Orange), four are trans or non-binary (Ethel Cain, Jacob Alon, Kae Tempest, jasmine.4.t). CMAT is bisexual but who's counting.
That said, or perhaps as expected, as I am working through the ones I don't know on Amazon Music, they can produce bloody good music. I saw Ethel Cain at the Hammersmith
ApolloEventim the other day and she was sublime.And yes what was an old white straight bloke doing at an Ethel Cain concert.
Anyway, political betting.
The most sensible London workers by middle age have moved out to the home counties, here in Essex for example you can earn a London salary with half the living costs and buy a property far cheaper in most areas. Hence even in 2024 most of Essex did not vote Labour
Healthcare is complex and medical errors happen all the time!
(Yes I know of a few MAGA accounts on Twitter).
There are other places outside London that might have the labour market to support a public body that wants a deep pool of talent, like Manchester or Leeds or Edinburgh. But they also have expensive housing markets. If you want good people you need a deep labour market which implies good private sector employers which implies high competitor salaries and expensive housing, sorry.
She describes the job as getting harder over the past few years (not just the last one!) and the amount of violence increasing.
None of it justifies an absence of basic competence in running what the state has taken on itself to run and requires us to pay for. By far the biggest change needed is to run what there already is really well. HMRC answering the phone within two minutes and dealing with queries properly. Not releasing prisoners wrongly. Following up knife stabbings properly. Attending shop lifting and burglaries and prosecuting offenders. No change required, just competence.
No, it can't be done on the cheap. But incompetence costs as much.
I also have a major clash on the evening Saturday the 20th of December.
Spurs v Liverpool clashes with the final of Strictly.
And incidentally bad mistakes DO happen. During monitoring of my remission from leukeamia I had 3 monthly bone marrow samples taken. On one ocassion a locum doctor took the sample and sent it to the wrong place (Bristol rather than Professor Grimwade's lab in London). Result - I was called in again that same week for a second sampling... Not fun.
Andrew told by Government to fly to US for grilling on links to Jeffrey Epstein
https://x.com/nicholascecil/status/1986722041240687037
I'm not harking back to the past at all - I've said that we could have booking systems that work as another poster asked for. But you can't have that at the moment because of the absurd structure.
One example. Where I used to live. Two separate GP practices in the same health centre. Each with its own management team, its own contracts with other parts of the NHS, its own preferred treatment routes. Duplication. Complication. Cost. And for what choice? You get a GP at the one with capacity - there's no choice. You get sent where they send you. Teesside has a choice of ageing hospitals short on capacity. Work in Newcastle and an appointment there would suit you better? Tough.
Radical idea. Scrap the GP practices managing contracts to compete with each other. Scrap the market structure completely. Procure centrally. Your choice of hospital is almost certainly your closest one because thats what people want, but if you want to drop an appointment into the one near where you work or you have family its click click. Centralised.
My daughter recently divorced her husband and has bought a home nearby
It is extraordinary how bad most everyone has been in the process from the divorce lawyers, to the conveyancers, to the utility services, to the local council, and to Welsh Water who knew her water meter had been buried in road works two years previously and have not exposed it since
I do not like the word broken Britain but sadly it is and I see little prospects of any improvement soon
The prisons still use paper with no computerised records as WIfi is not available apparently
Of course the collapse of the prison and courts happened under successive governments alongside so much more, but ultimately we expect to pour countless billions into a failing NHS with little or no reform, pensions and benefits are out of control, paying interest on our debt of £100 billion pa, etc and we wonder why we are where we are
Labour's answer is to tax and tax everything in sight, hand out billions more on WFP, triple lock, and now abolitioning the 2 child cap.
This has to stop and radical action is required to change the direction of the economy but nobody is brave enough as they perceive the public will not elect them
Ultimately this only ends up one way and that is the IMF intervening
And to those who blame the 'other lot' each lot is to blame and no political party is any better than the other at facing realism
I was once involved with a move from London to Coventry and was slightly surprised by how many of my colleagues wanted to move. Well, lower living costs, opportunity to buy a big family house without a massive commute, plenty of housing at different price ranges, you can live in Stratford upon Avon if you can afford it. Only an hour from London by train, and it was an education quango so many spouses were teachers, and you can get a job anywhere.
In Essex though Labour still only won 5 out of 18 MPs
The alogarithims pushing different views are very much more powerful and sinister than the Murdoch press of the nineties.
The headphones that play the future
Apple’s new headphones can translate in real time
7 November 2025"
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-headphones-that-play-the-future
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1986599661126492594.html
Nobody else thinks a senior politician making AI deepfake videos of another senior politician (silly or not) is crossing a line? No?
https://x.com/mikeysmith/status/1986697254535897205