{"id":1606,"date":"2013-04-16T15:29:28","date_gmt":"2013-04-16T15:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xislblogs.xtreamlab.net\/slwoods\/?p=1606"},"modified":"2013-07-06T08:30:49","modified_gmt":"2013-07-06T08:30:49","slug":"margaret-hodge-interpreting-contract-a-fiasco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/?p=1606","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Hodge: interpreting contract a &#8220;fiasco&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><figure id=\"attachment_1615\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1615\" style=\"width: 164px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/23\/2013\/04\/164px-Margaret_Hodge.jpg\" alt=\"image of Margaret Hodge MP\" width=\"164\" height=\"240\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1615\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1615\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Margaret Hodge MP. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>Last June the British government introduced plans to shake up Whitehall with the aim of making the civil service smaller, less bureaucratic, faster and more accountable.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday senior mandarins reported to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.parliament.uk\/pac\">House of Commons Public Accounts Committee<\/a> (PAC) on progress to date. However, PAC Chair Margaret Hodge MP expressed concern that within the Civil Service failure frequently went unpunished, stating:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The mood out there is all too often people in the Civil Service don&#8217;t get held to account for performance and may get rewarded for failure; and most recently we saw the Home Affairs Select Committee report on <acronym title=\"UK Border Agency\">UKBA<\/acronym> where the head of UKBA &#8211; and this is no [sic] personal; it&#8217;s not for me to judge, but just hearing what Home Affairs Select Committee did &#8211; the head of UKBA was found more than wanting and they expressed surprise that she&#8217;d then been given the stewardship of <acronym title=\"HM Revenue &amp; Customs\">HMRC<\/acronym>. Now for the public that doesn&#8217;t establish great confidence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Margaret Hodge later listed some of the more spectacular failures in Whitehall&#8217;s record of contracting out public services:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I remember the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/West_Coast_Main_Line\">West Coast main line<\/a>; that was a fiasco. I remember the <acronym title=\"Ministry of Justice\">MoJ<\/acronym> interpreters&#8217; contract; that was a fiasco in the MoJ. I&#8217;m afraid the <acronym title=\"Department for Work and Pensions\">DWP<\/acronym> &#8211; you may think they&#8217;re improving &#8211; we think that the way they&#8217;ve handled the contracts on the Work Programme has been less than satisfactory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>For the benefit of Ministry of Justice mandarins and Capita Translation &amp; Interpreting, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thefreedictionary.com\/fiasco\">dictionary definition of a fiasco<\/a> is &#8220;<em>a complete failure, especially one that is ignominious or humiliating<\/em>&#8220;. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><em>Hat tip: <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Geoffrey_M_B\">Geoffrey Buckingham<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last June the British government introduced plans to shake up Whitehall with the aim of making the civil service smaller, less bureaucratic, faster and more accountable. Yesterday senior mandarins reported to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on progress to date. However, PAC Chair Margaret Hodge MP expressed concern that within the Civil [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,15],"tags":[31,22,20],"class_list":["post-1606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-translation-and-language-related-matters","category-politics","tag-crapita","tag-language","tag-politics-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1606"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2271,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions\/2271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}