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I'm sure the UK is in the top twenty countries in the world for logistics infrastructure. It's easy to read news stories about your country messing things up, a

I'm sure the UK is in the top twenty countries in the world for logistics infrastructure. It's easy to read news stories about your country messing things up, and quietly not read foreign-language media about poorer countries messing things up a lot more by comparison, and get a biased perspective.

EliRivers 6y ago
The infrastructure, absolutely. A serious road, rail and air network, lots of companies with lots of experience and all the right gear and so on. Where we fuck up is in the competency of the people in charge of awarding contracts. Be it Grayling giving millions of pounds to a ferry company with no ferries owned or leased, or indeed any experience at all with ferries (and, wonderfully, with a T&Cs on their website copy-pasted from a pizza delivery site). As a wonderful finale, the government was sued by EuroTunnel because they awarded the contract without going through the proper process (which, of course, would have meant that the drawbacks of a pizza delivery business offering ferries might have been identified); we gave millions to a Ferry company incapable of delivering anything, and then millions to an actual transport company in compensation for breaking the rules on tendering. Or be it KFC awarding their chicken distribution (despite warnings from people who knew) to a company with no experience in or facilities for cold food distribution, leading to KFC going literally out of business for a couple of weeks because they had no chicken in the stores. We Brits have a competent infrastructure and the ability for the people in charge to award contracts to entirely the wrong parts of it.
- string 6y ago
  I know it's guaranteed internet points to deride the current government, and the ferry thing is/was despicable, but I think it's highly unlikely they're going to put KFC in charge of logistical operations for the vaccine rollout.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    That's a deliberate misinterpretation of what was said.
  - FractalParadigm 6y ago
    The point being made is that you have to give out the contracts to vetted companies who can actually deliver on it. Just because there's a cheapest option that, on paper, seems to tick all the boxes, doesn't mean said option is actually any good.
  - prodent 6y ago
    If they learned their lesson, shouldn't they be pretty much predestined for the job?
  - DanBC 6y ago
    Serco fucked up Test and Trace. Large PPE contracts were given to companies with no experience in making nor providing PPE, while companies with some experience were ignored. (Sometimes these contracts were awarded to personal contacts of ministers -- one was given to a bloke in the pub who happened to have the minister's contacts in WhatsApp.
  - EliRivers 6y ago
    Well thanks for chipping in [0]. Got anymore glib, smug responses to things that nobody said? [0] I don't actually mean "thanks". That's childish and passive-aggressive of me, and I shouldn't do it. What I really mean is to suggest that I think you've added nothing to this and that you're addressing a point that nobody made, for reasons only you know. I would guess that it's some kind of hyperbole, and that what you kind of mean is "oh, for something as important as this, someone will do a proper job" which is at least a meaningful statement (if perhaps something of a triumph of hope over experience), but if I have to pick apart your snark to get the actual meaning, I'm doing your job for you. Can you not just write clearly, and state what you mean? Both of the massive fuckups I listed were highly unlikely, but they still happened.
    - string 6y ago
      Yeesh, it was a light hearted joke about KFC because of the mildly amusing tangential link you made between the logistical problems of a fast-food retailer and a nationwide once-in-a-lifetime government backed vaccine rollout. No, I didn't actually interpret your comment as a claim that KFC will be in charge of the rollout. There's no need to be aggressive.
VBprogrammer 6y ago
It's a fairly stereotypical British trait to be self deprecating. If we were singlehandedly saving the world from a rogue asteroid the general sentiment would probably be "let's hope we don't mess this up".
- hermitcrab 6y ago
  Sadly, they are being realistic. The current UK government is riven with incompetence and cronyism. They couldn't organize a piss up a brewery.
  - brigandish 6y ago
    Government is a continuum, and I don’t remember a time that it wasn’t riven with cronyism. A book came out in 2005 called The Essential Guide to Quangos and I’m willing to bet it wasn’t Blair’s government that invented them (and it certainly didn’t put a stop to them).
    - thu2111 6y ago
      The quango is the worst of all worlds, so it's not surprising that the concept was invented by governments. I haven't seen the word used outside the UK so a definition might be useful: a quango, or quasi non-governmental organisation is the platypus of the British government world. As the name implies it's neither a part of the government nor the private sector. Instead, quangos are paid for by taxpayers but are completely unaccountable to them, as they can't be directly controlled by ministers or the civil service. The theory behind this is that governments are crap at things because elected politicians interfere with the expert work of technocrats. So by setting up artificial blockades to political interference, power is transferred to technocrats and things should work better. In practice what happens is that the government ends up hiring people who aren't very good at what they claim to be expert in, and who get corrupted by whatever unaccountable powers have been delegated to them. But they aren't easily fixable because they're "independent". The Electoral Commission is a good example of a completely broken quango. Its only goal in life is to organise elections and referendums in ways that everyone agrees is completely fair and trustworthy. It is a staggering failure: the board of directors is full of people who publicly state very strong political opinions. It engaged in a legal vendetta against people who campaigned for Brexit. It has constantly prosecuted pro-Leave campaigners and got its ass kicked in court, where judges have repeatedly dismissed cases on the grounds that they have no evidence and/or are engaged in malicious legal behaviour. They've referred cases to the police that were then dropped for lack of evidence. Senior staff have posted on Facebook that they cried when the Tories won the election. Nobody who has followed these sagas can possibly believe these people are neutral, independent or even possess basic competence, but as they're a "quango" there isn't much of a framework to fix it beyond changing the law to totally abolish them. tl;dr quango = power without accountability.
DanBC 6y ago
We had excellent Public Health test and trace departments who had a wealth of experience of tracing people for sexual health purposes. But we still chose to give the contract to Dido Harding despite her poor record at NHS Improvement. And I saw what happened to NHS Logistics, which was one bit of the NHS that wasn't losing money. It was running well. It was privatised to DHL in 2006 for purely ideological reasons, and then for several years was terrible. Ten years later, after Lord Carter's report into efficiency and productivity, we set up a new org called NHS Supply Chain and in effect re-nationalised it by giving the responsibility to a company which is owned by the Secretary of State for the Department for Health and Social Care. I don't think anyone has really learned any lessons from that.
- ksec 6y ago
  From a high level overview and global perspective, what the OP is saying, or meant, is that comparatively speaking UK is much better than possibly 80% of developed countries. Not to say NHS is without flaws, far from it. But if you step outside and look around the world many are surprised how awful public health services and logistics can be. So to put it another way, It is not that NHS is good, it is just the others are worse. Although this conclusion or opinion also makes me rather sad.
  - Wintamute 6y ago
    What you're missing is that amongst a certain class of Brit, and across much of the West, relentless and savage cultural self-criticism has become the norm, and a currency used for in-group signalling. Even when people in the UK should be celebrating, as literally the first country in the world to develop an approved C19 vaccine in record breaking time, and enjoy the privilege of a free health system that can roll it out within _weeks_ they still find a way to twist it. Asking them to truly recognise the fact that there indeed exists big differences between the UK and much of the world in this respect will fall on deaf ears - it doesn't serve their purpose - which to be clear, isn't truth-telling or (heaven forbid expressing pride in their national achievements) it's a habit of personal advancement at the expense of others and dissolving their own culture in an acid bath of manifold criticism. It's only where this sort of criticism is expressed in forums with international readers, many in far less fortunate positions, does it begin to reveal itself for the pathology that it is.
tialaramex 6y ago
Sure, but the political party currently in government (and the particular people from that party in government) have shown great inclination to put "Favour for an old friend" above "This makes sense to not kill thousands of people" in their priorities. The UK has universal healthcare so the infrastructure and public understanding are in place to actually do the vaccination programme per se. I have every confidence that the NHS medics will do their part efficiently as they do every year for the Flu shot I get, but getting frozen vaccine delivered to local NHS clinics is a logistics problem and an opportunity for somebody's wife's best friend's ex-boyfriend to be given a £100M contract even though he has no relevant experience and is obviously the wrong choice. Six months later, with headlines about vaccine shipments defrosting abandoned in carparks miles from their intended destination and tens of thousands more dead the government will announce it had a brain wave, the Army (always the people drafted in when policy has failed) will now deliver vaccines. Don't worry about the money which has meanwhile mysteriously increased to £250M due to "performance payments" which somehow didn't involve performance but did involve payments - that's water under the bridge, can't be helped ... Remember when we were going to do a snap Brexit, no transition, just drop dead one day suddenly? Basically the same group of fools paid people with no relevant experience and no ships to provide last minute ferry services. How do you provide ferry services with no ships? You don't, you just pocket the cash.
swarnie_ 6y ago
OP appears to have got lost on the way to /r/unitedkingdom where similar comments are generated by angry bots all day, every day. Some perspective would be nice. When you tell your buyers to go grab every last bit of PPE they can and cut them a blank cheque to do it of course you're not going to get the best price, especially when every other country in the world is doing the same things. Do you focus on the 10s of millions of pieces delivered successfully? Absolutely not, get the tinfoil and red yarn out, we'll dig up something questionable. I've seen some other countries equipping medical staff in bin liners and gaffer tape, on reflection we have it pretty good.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  I mean, even their own watchdogs say that there were problems: >In the months following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 in the UK, government awarded around £18 billion of contracts using emergency procurement regulations to buy goods, services and works to support its response to the pandemic. Government was having to work at pace, with no experience of using emergency procurement on such a scale before and was developing its approach at the same time as procuring large quantities of goods and services quickly, frequently from suppliers it had not previously worked with, in a highly competitive international market. This procurement activity secured unprecedented volumes of essential supplies necessary to protect front-line workers. Our separate report on the supply of PPE looks in detail at the extent to which demand for that equipment was met and the value-for-money achieved. While government had the necessary legal framework in place to award contracts directly, it had to balance the need to procure large volumes of goods and services quickly, with the increased commercial and propriety risks associated with emergency procurement. We looked in detail at a sample of contracts selected on a risk basis. Although we found sufficient documentation for a number of procurements in our sample, we also found specific examples where there is insufficient documentation on key decisions, or how risks such as perceived or actual conflicts of interest have been identified or managed. In addition, a number of contracts were awarded retrospectively, or have not been published in a timely manner. This has diminished public transparency, and the lack of adequate documentation means we cannot give assurance that government has adequately mitigated the increased risks arising from emergency procurement or applied appropriate commercial practices in all cases. While we recognise that these were exceptional circumstances, there are standards that the public sector will always need to apply if it is to maintain public trust. From: https://www.nao.org.uk/report/government-procurement-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/ https://www.nao.org.uk/report/government-procurement-during-... And remember everyone, when reading reports like this one should replace any soft seeming rebukes with phrases such as "these muppets had no idea what they were doing" and "this looks incredibly corrupt, but if we say that this report will never be released".
makomk 6y ago
Even success story South Korea has been doing a lot worse than you'd think from the BBC coverage. For example, they ran this article about Europe struggling with Covid that made it sound like South Korea's test and trace is working so well, they can even reopen pubs and nightclubs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-54482905 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-54482905 In reality, pub closures and social distancing measures had only been lifted the day before the article, every time they've lifted them before cases have gone up and they've had to reimpose them, and this time was no exception. You wouldn't know that from the BBC coverage, at all. If the UK was doing the same thing, there'd be endless headlines about U-turns, arbitrary and unpredictable measures that change for no reason, the cost to businesses of both the closures and the uncertainty - but because it's happening in South Korea readers are given the false impression that it isn't happening at all. A huge part of the perception that the UK is failing at dealing with Covid-19 due to awarding contracts to cronies comes from exactly this comparison with a South Korean success story that is a complete and utter media illusion. (They're also testing at something like a twentieth the rate of the UK - not enough to offer free testing to everyone with potential symptoms like we do, let alone do regular testing of all medical staff or any of the other things our press says our government is incompetent for not achieving - but you wouldn't know that from the UK media coverage either. Judging from their media reporting on the number of people awaiting results, they're probably not even doing any better at returning the results to people fast either.) Sometimes they even just outright lie. When the UK hit 100,000 Covid tests in a day, the BBC ran a completely false claim that Germany reached that level of testing a month before the UK when in reality they didn't until several months after us. The BBC kept that claim in an article that was prominently featured on their news front page for a month after they were aware it was false meaning a substantial proportion of the entire UK population probably saw it. I still see it popping up everywhere. (They also claimed that meeting the 100,000 a day goal was faked by counting tests when they were sent out rather than when they were completed. In reality, it was met either way, and one of the minsters involved even pointed this out in a BBC interview - but people who followed the BBC coverage wouldn't know about it.)

EliRivers 6y ago

The infrastructure, absolutely. A serious road, rail and air network, lots of companies with lots of experience and all the right gear and so on. Where we fuck up is in the competency of the people in charge of awarding contracts. Be it Grayling giving millions of pounds to a ferry company with no ferries owned or leased, or indeed any experience at all with ferries (and, wonderfully, with a T&Cs on their website copy-pasted from a pizza delivery site). As a wonderful finale, the government was sued by EuroTunnel because they awarded the contract without going through the proper process (which, of course, would have meant that the drawbacks of a pizza delivery business offering ferries might have been identified); we gave millions to a Ferry company incapable of delivering anything, and then millions to an actual transport company in compensation for breaking the rules on tendering. Or be it KFC awarding their chicken distribution (despite warnings from people who knew) to a company with no experience in or facilities for cold food distribution, leading to KFC going literally out of business for a couple of weeks because they had no chicken in the stores. We Brits have a competent infrastructure and the ability for the people in charge to award contracts to entirely the wrong parts of it.

string 6y ago
I know it's guaranteed internet points to deride the current government, and the ferry thing is/was despicable, but I think it's highly unlikely they're going to put KFC in charge of logistical operations for the vaccine rollout.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  That's a deliberate misinterpretation of what was said.
- FractalParadigm 6y ago
  The point being made is that you have to give out the contracts to vetted companies who can actually deliver on it. Just because there's a cheapest option that, on paper, seems to tick all the boxes, doesn't mean said option is actually any good.
- prodent 6y ago
  If they learned their lesson, shouldn't they be pretty much predestined for the job?
- DanBC 6y ago
  Serco fucked up Test and Trace. Large PPE contracts were given to companies with no experience in making nor providing PPE, while companies with some experience were ignored. (Sometimes these contracts were awarded to personal contacts of ministers -- one was given to a bloke in the pub who happened to have the minister's contacts in WhatsApp.
- EliRivers 6y ago
  Well thanks for chipping in [0]. Got anymore glib, smug responses to things that nobody said? [0] I don't actually mean "thanks". That's childish and passive-aggressive of me, and I shouldn't do it. What I really mean is to suggest that I think you've added nothing to this and that you're addressing a point that nobody made, for reasons only you know. I would guess that it's some kind of hyperbole, and that what you kind of mean is "oh, for something as important as this, someone will do a proper job" which is at least a meaningful statement (if perhaps something of a triumph of hope over experience), but if I have to pick apart your snark to get the actual meaning, I'm doing your job for you. Can you not just write clearly, and state what you mean? Both of the massive fuckups I listed were highly unlikely, but they still happened.
  - string 6y ago
    Yeesh, it was a light hearted joke about KFC because of the mildly amusing tangential link you made between the logistical problems of a fast-food retailer and a nationwide once-in-a-lifetime government backed vaccine rollout. No, I didn't actually interpret your comment as a claim that KFC will be in charge of the rollout. There's no need to be aggressive.

VBprogrammer 6y ago

It's a fairly stereotypical British trait to be self deprecating. If we were singlehandedly saving the world from a rogue asteroid the general sentiment would probably be "let's hope we don't mess this up".

hermitcrab 6y ago
Sadly, they are being realistic. The current UK government is riven with incompetence and cronyism. They couldn't organize a piss up a brewery.
- brigandish 6y ago
  Government is a continuum, and I don’t remember a time that it wasn’t riven with cronyism. A book came out in 2005 called The Essential Guide to Quangos and I’m willing to bet it wasn’t Blair’s government that invented them (and it certainly didn’t put a stop to them).
  - thu2111 6y ago
    The quango is the worst of all worlds, so it's not surprising that the concept was invented by governments. I haven't seen the word used outside the UK so a definition might be useful: a quango, or quasi non-governmental organisation is the platypus of the British government world. As the name implies it's neither a part of the government nor the private sector. Instead, quangos are paid for by taxpayers but are completely unaccountable to them, as they can't be directly controlled by ministers or the civil service. The theory behind this is that governments are crap at things because elected politicians interfere with the expert work of technocrats. So by setting up artificial blockades to political interference, power is transferred to technocrats and things should work better. In practice what happens is that the government ends up hiring people who aren't very good at what they claim to be expert in, and who get corrupted by whatever unaccountable powers have been delegated to them. But they aren't easily fixable because they're "independent". The Electoral Commission is a good example of a completely broken quango. Its only goal in life is to organise elections and referendums in ways that everyone agrees is completely fair and trustworthy. It is a staggering failure: the board of directors is full of people who publicly state very strong political opinions. It engaged in a legal vendetta against people who campaigned for Brexit. It has constantly prosecuted pro-Leave campaigners and got its ass kicked in court, where judges have repeatedly dismissed cases on the grounds that they have no evidence and/or are engaged in malicious legal behaviour. They've referred cases to the police that were then dropped for lack of evidence. Senior staff have posted on Facebook that they cried when the Tories won the election. Nobody who has followed these sagas can possibly believe these people are neutral, independent or even possess basic competence, but as they're a "quango" there isn't much of a framework to fix it beyond changing the law to totally abolish them. tl;dr quango = power without accountability.

DanBC 6y ago

We had excellent Public Health test and trace departments who had a wealth of experience of tracing people for sexual health purposes. But we still chose to give the contract to Dido Harding despite her poor record at NHS Improvement. And I saw what happened to NHS Logistics, which was one bit of the NHS that wasn't losing money. It was running well. It was privatised to DHL in 2006 for purely ideological reasons, and then for several years was terrible. Ten years later, after Lord Carter's report into efficiency and productivity, we set up a new org called NHS Supply Chain and in effect re-nationalised it by giving the responsibility to a company which is owned by the Secretary of State for the Department for Health and Social Care. I don't think anyone has really learned any lessons from that.

ksec 6y ago
From a high level overview and global perspective, what the OP is saying, or meant, is that comparatively speaking UK is much better than possibly 80% of developed countries. Not to say NHS is without flaws, far from it. But if you step outside and look around the world many are surprised how awful public health services and logistics can be. So to put it another way, It is not that NHS is good, it is just the others are worse. Although this conclusion or opinion also makes me rather sad.
- Wintamute 6y ago
  What you're missing is that amongst a certain class of Brit, and across much of the West, relentless and savage cultural self-criticism has become the norm, and a currency used for in-group signalling. Even when people in the UK should be celebrating, as literally the first country in the world to develop an approved C19 vaccine in record breaking time, and enjoy the privilege of a free health system that can roll it out within _weeks_ they still find a way to twist it. Asking them to truly recognise the fact that there indeed exists big differences between the UK and much of the world in this respect will fall on deaf ears - it doesn't serve their purpose - which to be clear, isn't truth-telling or (heaven forbid expressing pride in their national achievements) it's a habit of personal advancement at the expense of others and dissolving their own culture in an acid bath of manifold criticism. It's only where this sort of criticism is expressed in forums with international readers, many in far less fortunate positions, does it begin to reveal itself for the pathology that it is.

tialaramex 6y ago

Sure, but the political party currently in government (and the particular people from that party in government) have shown great inclination to put "Favour for an old friend" above "This makes sense to not kill thousands of people" in their priorities. The UK has universal healthcare so the infrastructure and public understanding are in place to actually do the vaccination programme per se. I have every confidence that the NHS medics will do their part efficiently as they do every year for the Flu shot I get, but getting frozen vaccine delivered to local NHS clinics is a logistics problem and an opportunity for somebody's wife's best friend's ex-boyfriend to be given a £100M contract even though he has no relevant experience and is obviously the wrong choice. Six months later, with headlines about vaccine shipments defrosting abandoned in carparks miles from their intended destination and tens of thousands more dead the government will announce it had a brain wave, the Army (always the people drafted in when policy has failed) will now deliver vaccines. Don't worry about the money which has meanwhile mysteriously increased to £250M due to "performance payments" which somehow didn't involve performance but did involve payments - that's water under the bridge, can't be helped ... Remember when we were going to do a snap Brexit, no transition, just drop dead one day suddenly? Basically the same group of fools paid people with no relevant experience and no ships to provide last minute ferry services. How do you provide ferry services with no ships? You don't, you just pocket the cash.

swarnie_ 6y ago

OP appears to have got lost on the way to /r/unitedkingdom where similar comments are generated by angry bots all day, every day. Some perspective would be nice. When you tell your buyers to go grab every last bit of PPE they can and cut them a blank cheque to do it of course you're not going to get the best price, especially when every other country in the world is doing the same things. Do you focus on the 10s of millions of pieces delivered successfully? Absolutely not, get the tinfoil and red yarn out, we'll dig up something questionable. I've seen some other countries equipping medical staff in bin liners and gaffer tape, on reflection we have it pretty good.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
I mean, even their own watchdogs say that there were problems: >In the months following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 in the UK, government awarded around £18 billion of contracts using emergency procurement regulations to buy goods, services and works to support its response to the pandemic. Government was having to work at pace, with no experience of using emergency procurement on such a scale before and was developing its approach at the same time as procuring large quantities of goods and services quickly, frequently from suppliers it had not previously worked with, in a highly competitive international market. This procurement activity secured unprecedented volumes of essential supplies necessary to protect front-line workers. Our separate report on the supply of PPE looks in detail at the extent to which demand for that equipment was met and the value-for-money achieved. While government had the necessary legal framework in place to award contracts directly, it had to balance the need to procure large volumes of goods and services quickly, with the increased commercial and propriety risks associated with emergency procurement. We looked in detail at a sample of contracts selected on a risk basis. Although we found sufficient documentation for a number of procurements in our sample, we also found specific examples where there is insufficient documentation on key decisions, or how risks such as perceived or actual conflicts of interest have been identified or managed. In addition, a number of contracts were awarded retrospectively, or have not been published in a timely manner. This has diminished public transparency, and the lack of adequate documentation means we cannot give assurance that government has adequately mitigated the increased risks arising from emergency procurement or applied appropriate commercial practices in all cases. While we recognise that these were exceptional circumstances, there are standards that the public sector will always need to apply if it is to maintain public trust. From: https://www.nao.org.uk/report/government-procurement-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/ https://www.nao.org.uk/report/government-procurement-during-... And remember everyone, when reading reports like this one should replace any soft seeming rebukes with phrases such as "these muppets had no idea what they were doing" and "this looks incredibly corrupt, but if we say that this report will never be released".

makomk 6y ago

Even success story South Korea has been doing a lot worse than you'd think from the BBC coverage. For example, they ran this article about Europe struggling with Covid that made it sound like South Korea's test and trace is working so well, they can even reopen pubs and nightclubs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-54482905 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-54482905 In reality, pub closures and social distancing measures had only been lifted the day before the article, every time they've lifted them before cases have gone up and they've had to reimpose them, and this time was no exception. You wouldn't know that from the BBC coverage, at all. If the UK was doing the same thing, there'd be endless headlines about U-turns, arbitrary and unpredictable measures that change for no reason, the cost to businesses of both the closures and the uncertainty - but because it's happening in South Korea readers are given the false impression that it isn't happening at all. A huge part of the perception that the UK is failing at dealing with Covid-19 due to awarding contracts to cronies comes from exactly this comparison with a South Korean success story that is a complete and utter media illusion. (They're also testing at something like a twentieth the rate of the UK - not enough to offer free testing to everyone with potential symptoms like we do, let alone do regular testing of all medical staff or any of the other things our press says our government is incompetent for not achieving - but you wouldn't know that from the UK media coverage either. Judging from their media reporting on the number of people awaiting results, they're probably not even doing any better at returning the results to people fast either.) Sometimes they even just outright lie. When the UK hit 100,000 Covid tests in a day, the BBC ran a completely false claim that Germany reached that level of testing a month before the UK when in reality they didn't until several months after us. The BBC kept that claim in an article that was prominently featured on their news front page for a month after they were aware it was false meaning a substantial proportion of the entire UK population probably saw it. I still see it popping up everywhere. (They also claimed that meeting the 100,000 a day goal was faked by counting tests when they were sent out rather than when they were completed. In reality, it was met either way, and one of the minsters involved even pointed this out in a BBC interview - but people who followed the BBC coverage wouldn't know about it.)