A poll out today has Labour 8 points ahead, but perhaps more interestingly shows 50% (including 29% of Leave voters) in favour of a second Brexit referendum, with only 34% against the idea.
Don’t know if anyone has mentioned that odious toad Branson and his company ‘Virgincare’ threatening to sue the NHS and winning an undisclosed sum (rumoured to be at least £328k) due to flaws in the bidding process for contracts. Any ideas if true, spin or ‘fake news’ ? If true then I really didn’t think I could hate the fella even more than I do already.
You upset because it’s the NHS he threatened to sue? I don’t know about Virgincare but most things bearing the Virgin Brand don’t actually belong to him, they are franchises or sell offs. And if an NHS bidding process is flawed it should be fixed. Or just have no competition in the NHS at all (unfortunately they will still have to buy medicines made by the private sector. And all the equipment they use).
Of course I’m pissed off ‘cos if true, its a multi billionaire threatening to sue my future employer....obviously. And then he pretends to be cuddly Ritch, the man of the people while ****ing over the countries health service. I take your point about the ‘Virgin’ brand not being all Branson’s and don’t know with ‘Virgincare’ if this is the case or not.....and if you read my post I was asking if anyone knew if this was ‘fake news’....as there surely must be more to it..... So can you enlighten me any further ?
It seems it is true. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/28/nhs-pays-virgin-threatens-sue-losing-contract/ It doesn’t surprise me that the procurement process was faulty, I’ve seen it in action both from within the NHS (admittedly a long time ago) and (at a distance) as a supplier. I can guarantee you that on an £82m contract, Virgincare will have spent more than £328k, if that was the settlement, on preparing and submitting their bid. Put Branson out of your mind, and what you may think of private sector suppliers providing NHS services. If a company enters a managed bidding process and that process is shown to be faulty, potentially favouring a competitor, should they just walk away, shrugging their shoulders? I suspect you are going to spend quite a bit of time on litigation and liability on your training course mate.
Some good points as always mate. I still think morally it’s wrong but of course, morals don’t come into most, if any, business. And of course I didn’t factor in the cost of preparing the bid. Would it really be £300k plus ? I’m getting into the wrong game.
On an £80m contract to run children’s services it would have been a very big investment in making sure they had a proposal that would work - just think of all the risk the service provider takes on, all the other agencies that they would rely on. Having read the article again they were about to sue 6 NHS commissioning groups, NHS England and Surrey County Council and just one of the Commissioning Groups paid out £328k, so doubtless Virgincare got a lot more, possibly nearer £3m in total. Of course it’s a waste of time and taxpayers money, but they should have got it right in the first place.
Does the nhs buy as a whole or does each area do its own deals Read recently of a purchase of disposable gloves at 16 quid a pack instead of the 36 pence it should have been If that's a true story and reflection of purchasing waste no wonder the place is in such financial turmoil
Now that it is not going to court we’ll never know. Virgin used to run the service for half the patch and ‘social enterprises’ the other half. The contract was to bring it together. I’d guess that they applied the weighting on some of the assessment criteria in such a way to give the social enterprises and ex NHS management team which won the contract an unfair advantage. Or information was leaked to the winners - either on Virgins bid, so they could beat it, or on elements of the assessment process.
300k is a cheap pitch in my experience We spent 725k just winning Nationwide recently 7 year contract.
I think it depends on what is being procured Kiwi. I’d be really surprised if that glove story was true. I think there are 5 or 6 procurement ‘hubs’ which negotiate big deals through tender processes for disposables like gloves, medical devices and generic drugs (been a lot of problems with these as, unlike the branded stuff which my company makes which is price and profit controlled, they rely on competition to keep generic prices low. If only one company is making the drug they can charge what they want). I think the ‘hubs’ are meant to tell each other about the best deals. I have a mate who runs a medical devices company (kit to help people breathe) who tells me the whole system is both bureaucratic and dodgy. These contracts are huge and have to be posted in some EU Journal.
dont those bloody tories know when to stop and get the heads out of the trough Expenses scandal of Corbyn aide 'Lord Swampy' is revealed: How the squatter turned Labour peer pocketed £41,000 in travel fares AND £260,000 for a 'home' that doesn't exist Corbyn aide Lord Bassam admitted he had been at fault over travel expenses He faces further questions over another £260,000 ‘second home’ allowance He has pocketed the allowance since 2010 - despite not having a second home please log in to view this image Jeremy Corbyn was plunged into a major expenses scandal last night. Lord Bassam, Labour’s Chief Whip in the Lords, admitted that he had been wrong to claim tens of thousands of pounds in taxpayers’ money after The Mail on Sunday investigated his travel expenses. He faces further questions over another £260,000 ‘second home’ allowance that he has pocketed since 2010 – despite not having one. Lord Bassam last night promised to pay back up to £41,000 in expenses he claimed for commuting between Westminster and his Brighton home. If he was forced to pay back the housing allowance instead, the total would greatly exceed anything refunded by an MP in the 2009 Commons expenses scandal. The 64-year-old peer has been nicknamed ‘Lord Swampy’ – a reference to the New Age eco-warrior of the 1990s – because of his background as a squatters’ leader when he was plain Steve Bassam in the 1970s. He now lives with wife Jill in a £1 million townhouse in Brighton’s fashionable Kemptown district. Because of his position as Chief Whip, and because his main home is not in London, he is one of a handful of Lords’ frontbenchers entitled to a Lords Office Holders Allowance (LOHA), currently £36,366 a year (worth about £22,000 after tax). please log in to view this image The top-up – paid as part of his salary – is to cover peers’ ‘expenses in staying overnight away from their main or only residence’. But instead of spending the extra cash on a second home in London or hotel bills, Lord Bassam pockets it and joins commuters on the hour-long, 55-mile train trip between Brighton and the capital. Astonishingly, he also claims about £6,400 a year in expenses to pay for those train tickets and cab fares, despite the LOHA payments that assume he stays in London. The expenses scandal is particularly embarrassing for Mr Corbyn because, as Chief Whip, Bassam is in charge of maintaining discipline among Labour peers. Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
For someone who professes to be unable to research anything for himself, you don't half come up with some **** Kiwi.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/03/tony-blair-confirms-he-is-working-to-reverse-brexit @@@@.
At the same time as culling moderate MP candidates and councillors, using abuse and physical intimidation where necessary, Momentum is demanding Labour members, MP's, new MPs and ministers swear an oath of allegiance to leader Corbyn. I'm thinking the oath will be something like: "I swear to God this sacred oath that to the Leader of the Socialist Britain and its people, Jeremy Corbyn, our supreme commander, I shall render unconditional obedience and that as a brave worker and activist I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath." Presumably the oaths will be celebrated by a night-time torchlit parade, at which books on capitalism will be burned on bonfires.
What's **** about it, Strolls? Isn't it all true. He's agreed to repay the money. Isn't he just another pig in the expenses trough?
I wasn't questioning the validity of the story (although 'Jeremy Corbyn plunged into major expenses scandal' seems a bit over the top), merely curious as to where Kiwi finds all this stuff. Never mind - keep up the good work, Kiwi.
