Andy Hall wrote:

For example, my local highways department, in order to carry out a
survey for traffic planning and distribution hired an outside firm to
do most of the work while staff members sat in the office. This was
unknown to most councillors until they were made aware of it. It's
but one example of paying twice because those employed to do the work
are lazy, incompetent or both. In terms of the published figures £X
appeared as opposed to the £X/2 that it should have cost.

The most basic of capitalist principles tells us why LAs are not
greatly motivated to do as well as they can, while private companies
are. No system guarantees us the best across the board all the time,
but putting serious incentives of both carrot and stick type, as
capitalism does, is clearly going to motivate and generally produce
significant improvement over unmotivated (monopolistic) systems.


NT