More Idiot-Driven cuts, costing lives, making money

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11978002

This is corruption. Outsourcing government functions to private companies to do these things for profit by cutting staff, cutting service, but pocketing profits and presumably some of this profit is kicked back to the politicians who implemented the policy. On to the next contract and next blood sucking of the public blood. Total corruption which has become the "new normal" in the so-called Anglosphere in recent years.

Dear Macbeth,
England does not have money to pay for for basic services because it is paying welfare to millions of immigrants that the country doesn't need.

One hundred years ago Britain had the biggest empire that the world has ever seen, and the biggest manufacturing base.

And now? It makes me cry.

Macbeth

Do you spend much time at sea?

The Coastguard stations which it is proposed to merge are Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centres. These are the people you speak to on the radio, and who deploy Search and Rescue (SAR) resources to those in need. Some have already merged eg if you are off the North Coast of Scotland you will be in the Forth and Aberdeen sector. Provided they have sufficient resources, and adequate local knowledge - and it is a long way from Cape Wrath to Aberdeen - it does not matter where they are.

The UK is required to provide SAR to anyone in distress in the UK Search and Rescue Region, and has three organisations operating helicopters: HM Coastguard, The Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. Only the Coastguard helicopters are intended to provide civilian SAR - the armed forces helicopters are intended to rescue their own crews and do civil SAR as a sideline, although in practice the vast majority of their flights are for civil SAR.

The Coastguard helicopters are already run by a private contractor, CHC Scotia, who have extensive experience operating offshore helicopter flights, both in an SAR role, and in support of the offshore oil and gas industry. They provide an excellent service using Sikorsky S-92 and three new AgustaWestland AW 139 aircraft.

The current armed forces helicopters are Sea Kings, which are coming to the end of their service life and will need to be replaced whoever runs the service. The contract to operate the replacements has been awarded to Soteria (a consortium of CHC and Sikorsky) who will use the Sikorsky S-92, a much faster and more capable aircraft than the aging Sea King.

From the point of view of a potential service user, I do not care who's logo is on the side of the helicopter, or which uniform the crew wear, provided the service is effective and free at the point of use, and I'm sure this contract will achieve that, and will release armed forces personnel for their core mission, which is defence.

You can argue about the costs of the contract, and whether it would be more cost effective to buy the helicopters (and spare aircraft) outright and employ the crews within the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, but bear in mind that the MCA is quite small - it has a turn over half that of the RNLI, which provides the majority of UK lifeboats and is funded only by charity.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 61847.html

Might all be moot. Who knows what the f**k is going on any more?

Good experience in a single area does not provide knowledge of the greater whole. And I see no reason why the Agusta-Westland option (refitting at a substantially cheaper price) could not be pursued, rather than spending billions on a new outfit. Also, it seems a bit counter-productive to be buying any off the shelf military products at a time when we could probably do with creating more jobs rather than losing them. (IE the UK's own defence industry.) That is not to say that we should be following Labour's ridiculous lead by buying things we don't need just to create jobs. (Aircraft carriers that can't actually launch the ready-made yank planes we ordered.) but a functional modern replacement for the Sea King (or perhaps a nice new all-round transport helicopter even) isn't too much of a stretch. A 20 million pound refit of the Sea Kings would give us a long enough r+d window to do something like that.

Public is not always better than private, but that swings both ways, and if Dave really wants the private sector to create enough jobs to rehome all the people he's busy firing, it would serve him well to NOT ship all the private solutions abroad. I would accept a home-grown private company at a stretch, because at least then it would be helping our economy, rather than the Americans or the French.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 61847.html

So the potential "contractor" has the heebie-jeebies, but they're STILL closing the coastguard stations.

Does anybody in that shit-heap at Westminster have a clue what they are doing?

Governments should always ask the question, "make it or buy it," in regard to any program that it will provide to the public.

Some functions, like law-making, policing, diplomacy and the military, are generally incompatible with a, "buy it," solution. But other functions are much more amenable to public purchase of private services.

There is nothing in lifesaving and SAR that requires it to be performed by the military. The RNLI has been a functional, private component of the larger search and rescue framework for almost 200 years. Now, the operation of helicopters is a significantly more specialized activity than lifeboats, and generally requires paid, professional crews rather than the largely volunteer RNLI crews. But that can be sourced privately, and likely at significantly lower aggregate cost than through the armed forces.

"Buy it" means having government money to into the profits and bonuses of fatcats. Forget it. Government money has better purposes to serve than to fatten up fatcats further.

The council cheif in essex earns in excess of £240k and I think she's the only one in the south east region who isn't taking a 10% paycut

Pretty trivial compared to the money you can make from the mere fluctuations of a stock exchange in a day...or loose in the case of hedge funds.