For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
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By joe-fbs
#1605601
As ever, Kanga posts beautifully.

Meanwhile, the appalling behaviour of the government departments continues to be exposed: destroying people's records; refusing to accept evidence based on tax receipts; locking people in detention centres; it really is disgusting.
By TopCat
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1605603
kanga wrote:
OCB wrote:Kanga, if there was ever an academic review board for muppetry or tw@tology, you’d be without doubt a senior member.

Possibly you could add f@@kwittery to the remit- but it’s such a wide subject....


I wish I had sufficiently mastered informal English to know whether I should be flattered or offended... :oops: :)

But, obviously, Forumites are all too courteous ever to offend deliberately :D

It is, without a doubt, a compliment!
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By cockney steve
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1605608
@joe-fbs said
Meanwhile, the appalling behaviour of the government departments continues to be exposed: destroying people's records; refusing to accept evidence based on tax receipts; locking people in detention centres; it really is disgusting.


The people with power are politicians, by their very nature, they are devious, self-centred and amoral they will turn like a chameleon,to toe the party-line and subjugate any personal misgivings in order to preserve their own seat on the gravy-train.
The minions who actually execute the orders , do not have the moral fortitude or strength of conviction to rebel and refuse to execute the worst excesses of their masters *Godwin's Law* They too have a vested interest in maintaining their seat at the trough and a healthy pension. Now the truth starts to emerge about the administration of the Windrush immigrants, the usual mud- slinging starts, in order to throw a smokescreen over the total incompetence displayed by those who were in charge .
Also, of course, they're so damned stupid, they thought they could get away with it.....you may think I'm countering my own argument. The truth being that many career Public employees are just not capable of employment in a competitive, commercial environment. The cream rises and is skimmed off, the dross is retained and is happy to deploy their overpaid incompetence, safe in the knowledge that they can be totally unaccountable and hide behind the anonymous facade of their particular empire.

They don't care, why should they? they can blame those who are long-retired and current taxpayers will pick up the tab for the Enquiry and compensation to the wronged..

Standing by in my tinfoil hat. :P
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By joe-fbs
#1605621
Getting slightly off-topic but, Cockney Steve, my understanding is that after decades of contractorisation and privatisation, public service is no longer either secure or well-pensioned. Kanga will have the facts. Also, it is not, I believe, a public-private thing, large organisations tend to the same faults regardless of their ownership as all of us who have ever had the misfortune to try to deal with a bank, telecom provider or similar have experienced. Even with the sort of deliberately induced (by politicians) disgrace such as the "Windrush" affair, I am kind-of with Jeremy Hardy when he said something along the lines of rather the well-intentioned incompetence of the public sector than the greed driven incompetence of the private sector. Not that there was anything well-intentioned about Mrs May's "hostile environment" (her words).
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By Dave W
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1605634
Alternatively: A big enough mistake in the private sector and the company goes out of business and many people lose their jobs. Not so in the public sector.

It's not worth being black & white, public sector good/private sector bad about it.

I've worked in both - they each have different strengths and faults. Neither is perfect. Mostly people do their best.
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By defcribed
#1605638
joe-fbs wrote:As ever, Kanga posts beautifully.

Meanwhile, the appalling behaviour of the government departments continues to be exposed: destroying people's records; refusing to accept evidence based on tax receipts; locking people in detention centres; it really is disgusting.


Well, today we're told that it was the previous government that decided to chuck all the landing cards away....
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By kanga
#1605648
On the destruction of paper records; again, longish :oops: but for (non-partisan, as ever) background:

I have particular knowledge of this as a historian.

Typically, paper (or 3x5 or 5x8 cards, etc) records, particularly 'Registry Files', were, typically, systematically stored in publicly-owned storage sites if they were not of a sort which were likely to require immediate access for today's administrative purposes in the offices of the Departments which owned them. These were, quite often aircraft hangars on 'disused' airfields (another saga, of course :roll: ). There were both at the owning Departments and at the storage sites a small number of 'Registry' staff, often of lowish grades, who diligently kept indexes, shelving records, etc. At the storage sites the staff also tried to keep damp, fire and vermin (hangar cats!) at bay. Some MoD records have been badly damaged by asbestos in a hangar roof, which is now affecting FOIA requests, as they have to be retrieved by staff with protective clothing who then make copies with copiers inside the contaminated areas, with the individual sheets then passed out through a decontaminating hatch process. It is laborious and time-consuming, and some FOIA requesters apparently do not always accept that this is a valid reason for responding to their requests.

Starting in '80s, but particularly in early '90s, there was immense Treasury pressure on all Central and (in England&Wales) Local Government:

a. to outsource to the private sector anything which could be outsourced. This particularly affected jobs previously done by low-paid public servants, including Registry staff. It also included cleaners, messengers, catering, housekeeping, maintenance etc staff. Incidentally, it yielded a misleading impression that public sector wages had gone up: the average had only gone down because the lowest-paid people were no longer 'public sector'. The private sector contractors tendered for a service which initially included, for Registry functions, a commitment that they would 'safely' store all the records, and retrieve for a requesting Department a record in storage within a certain time. Initially the price of this was included in the initial contract, but later, at Treasury insistence, it might be changed so that the contract was to charge an annual fee for every 'shelf-metre' of storage boxes, each box then holding a certain number of files or trays of cards; plus a fee for each retrieval and delivery. These costs had previously been invisible to the requesting officials. That they now were not may be argued to be an improvement, of course; but it did mean that officials were being forced to think 'my budget does not allow me to do my job properly by the citizens I serve; do I bust the budget or do the best job I can within it ?'

b. to create a timetable for release for sale to the highest bidder in the private sector any buildings or estates (such as hangars or the airfields which housed them; but many others) not clearly needed for today's Government business. This included buildings used for current administrative purposes with significant onsite space devoted to Registry functions.

c. to identify and maximise the amount of current and capital savings which these would yield.

The effect of both of these pressures was that Departments (etc) were under great pressure to decide that records of all sorts need not be kept, onsite or at all, especially if a function or whole Department was moving from a larger building to a smaller, or several were being combined in a single building (or site, or town) which had previously been in many. This is reflected, for instance, in the great reduction of HMRC offices and the size and staffing of each. Departments had to decide whether to continue to pay a contractor for long-term storage and retrieval services for paper records, to pay another contractor to digitise all the records (with tricky 'data privacy' issues if the records held personal data such as health or immigration records), or to identify categories of records which were very rarely retrieved and to identify what might be the risks to administrative functions if they were destroyed. 'But something in that lot might be important in future' (to an individual or to some aspect of administration) was not an acceptable reason for paying for retention or retrievability if that sort of thing had not been much retrieved in the last n years.

In my historical researches I have often come across cases of records being destroyed (with a proper record of their destruction) when Registry functions were outsourced or offices consolidated. The residual Registry staff could not have been more helpful or more apologetic, but there was nothing they can do. I fully understood, but I gather some conspiracy theorists have screamed 'cover up' when a FOIA request is thus frustrated.

All the above is known to me. What is my mere speculation in the 'landing cards destruction' saga of claim and conterclaim is that:

- for several years until 2009 there were rarely occasions when the diligently preserved and indexed cards of 'landings' from before 1971 needed to be retrieved
- the relevant storage spaces (in the spaces of the Home Office or of its subordinate agencies eg Border Agency) were identified as 'too expensive' to maintain ..
- .. or to have digitised, for which there would have to be demonstrable recent evidence that IT-enabled searches of such 'landings' might be needed
- so that senior staff, challenged by Treasury or Ministers, could not reasonably argue that destruction was unwise, despite warnings from their juniors

But, then, Ministers in a new administration issued Regulation and 'guidance' whereby officials in, eg, benefits or health or education (and, eg, landlords and employers) were to assume that any apparent or admitted non-native was in the UK illegally unless the individual could prove otherwise by producing documentation which conformed to a particular, limited, list. Legal presence might be proved by proof of arrival prior to 1971, but such records were, now irretrievable.

As I said, this is mere speculation. As ever, I would welcome correction by the better-informed.
Last edited by kanga on Wed Apr 18, 2018 6:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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By Pete L
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1605820
I do sort of understand the landing card logic. The landing card is unlikely to be the sole original document that proves someone's been here since 1973 and is not of itself evidence they didn't just pop in to see their relatives and then go home. In an age where it's hard to prove identity and a lot of other people have an interest in faking it in the interests of gaining access, a single paper record is pretty poor evidence.

On the other hand it was a single corpus likely to be unpolluted by the corrupt - since it was gathered before a problem was perceived to exist - or lazy and easily accessible to the Home Office.
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By kanga
#1605822
cockney steve wrote:..
..many career Public employees are just not capable of employment in a competitive, commercial environment. The cream rises and is skimmed off, the dross is retained and is happy to deploy their overpaid incompetence, safe in the knowledge that they can be totally unaccountable and hide behind the anonymous facade of their particular empire...

Standing by in my tinfoil hat. :P


I'd hate to disappoint .. :)

As I may have mentioned in other threads, I have never seen any evidence nor had personal experience to justify this characterisation. Obviously, other Forumites' experience or evidence may be different ..

[what I have seen a great deal over recent years among my personal acquaintance is long-standing public service employees seeing their pay or pensions frozen or cut yet again, and quitting either on early retirement to start getting the reduced pension in genuine fear based on experience that further delay will mean an even lower pension when they do retire, or succumbing to the frequent blandishments from the outsourced contractors or agencies with whom they've been dealing for many years who have regularly offered better pay and perks, and better (and more secure) pensions, or both. They have been resisting such overtures out of a genuine sense of a public service vocation, but enough has become enough; and vituperative abuse from media and sometimes even their own Ministers has become a further nudge. An inevitable result is that the taxpayer ends up paying more for a worse (-staffed, -supported, and -motivated) service, because a private middleperson is adding considerably to the costs both of the service and the overheads of the tendering processes.]

hope the tinfoil hat is still comfy .. :)
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By OCB
#1605832
Kanga, I know it cross-thread pollution, but for me it is exactly the same phenomena(e) that led to Grenfell.

Some of my oldest friends are in the public sector. Some were public sector then “privatised”.

Ownership used to be,ish, a single vertical with an elected Minister on top.

Now it is a stramash of public/private w..kf...kery where that fragile but politically under appreciated “public spirit” has long since evaporated.
Many parts of the Civil Service, from what I understood from my mother + others, were considered and ran with nearly the same discipline as a the old “war offices”.

I guess now they have customer charters and regular review boards with kpi on satisfaction levels v throughput etc.

I know my gf in the mid 90s used to do all the medical book keeping for all the blind and partially sighted for the most of Scotland. She got replaced by over half a dozen expensive managers in each health authority. Not one single “user” of her services was happy about it.
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