Featured image: Skegness is SO Bracing: Newcastle Poster Company
We need to build a culture of trust between people. To do this we need to look closely at the crimes, social and health harms that have been caused under the ideology of ‘the value of privatising things and outsourcing‘ that seem to have done far more than simply encourage entrepreneurship, competitive tendering.
On the 5th July 2023 a radio discussion about the moral jeopardy of privatisation in relation to public services and health, pressing service and health issues at Thames Water, the NHS as well as at King’s Fund issued figures around the UK’s poor cancer survival rates.
A range of centre, centre right (and one left supporter) had a good old argument with witnesses from lobbies and other knowledgeable people.
(Mona Siddiqi, academic Melanie Phillips, Carmody Grey, Giles Fraser
What I realise looking back a year before the election of July 4th 2024 and now, in bright, cold, truthful Jan 2025 you can see that it’s very hard to have to be the clean up crew for the terrible disasters we’ve experienced as a society because of the way privatisation has been allowed to overwhelm law, accountability and developing a modern, safe, powerful, responsive and representative parliament for British people.
We all saw the way lobbies, supply chains operated during the pandemic what we’ve seen since are the numbers of tragedies and harms that have needed redress, retribution, compensation because parliament has become a place of legal gatekeepers and gatekeeping rather than a working, dynamic, joined up and modernising centre of British society where the questions from the parish, city, county, borough, district, region find connection, network, purpose, interpretation and meaning.
In the terrible list of harms to people during the last forty years privatisation has been constructed in a way that prevents us from participation, effectively preventing our systems from evolving to meet our aspirations.
In a way because of privatisations the idea of citizenship and representation is all ‘locked down’ only working for an elite who have an access all areas pass while we all wait, at a social distance in the navigational sludge for increasingly expensive tickets.
Everything (and nothing) is material so we remain spectators rather than participants, watching successive governments stroke ever more privatisation as if it was a big cat by an unchanging home and parliamentary fire when in fact it was an ideology that allowed terrible harms.
Labour now have these ‘scandals’ that we’ve all been touched by and all have had the right to participate in taken from us because privatisation has been the loudest voice in parliament: Council Housing (that became social housing), Hillsborough, Carillion, the loss of NHS dentistry, PPI (and now car finance) Pensions, WASPI women Grenfell, Windrush, (Contaminated) Infected Blood, Fujitsu DWP and Post Office Scandals
Most recently has been how the matrix of arguments around the development of the Grooming Economies is actually inextricably linked to a refusal to understand and articulate the relationship of the UK to the wider world historically, using race as a social weapon against truth and access to justice across society.
This form of harm can also be tied over the last forty years to privatisation in the the gaining (and then the loss) of equality rights, loss of working class neighbourhood schools, loss of legal economic opportunity in villages, towns, cities and the loss of accountability to neighbourhoods because of privatisation, the loss of democratic accountability to local neighbourhoods of local council because of central government cuts.
Privatisation has meant lots and lots of losses.
So in my understanding privatisation has become too big for its boots: it thinks it’s the story when in fact it should only ever be a small part of a linking of institutions, people and organisations to representation democracy, history, culture, economic opportunity.
When privatisation forces itself, like a predator onto a council to displace democratic services when because of staff reductions and cuts the way the technology used to facilitate Multi Agency Support Hubs is implemented has a massive impact on the depersonalisation of clients as well as the purpose of professionals in their roles.
Multiagency hub software is implemented in social services departments in the same way as an Experian or Capital One call centre rather than a community resource hub with a link to a longer history of neighbourhoods as places where people live or have a connection with, not simply where persons of interest might be, what could be happening are council services bringing together all the available resources becoming a service for callers to build the potential of multiagency working in a respectful, resourceful way.
When all the fails of an under resourced centre that allows technology to be owned by a financial service counting perspective rather than a community and people service perspective, the tone, register and health of what that service evolves to be are seriously undermined.
When this ‘permanently temporary’ service that, like the 30 year old CISCO militarised theme tune it drums as callers wait to be answered (its own customisable waiting theme never properly implemented, becoming always ‘temporarily permanent’, an ‘as if’; it has a massive impact on the culture, thinking and potential of a team.
Dystopia that we comply with: it doesn’t have to be this depressing and dark if we don’t want it to be!
When the talents, skills and abilities of staff are seen at a most superficial level as the number of keystrokes you make an hour in your own segmented bubble there’s a level of risk and distance from the client group that leads to prejudice and lack of motivation.
If multiagency teams are administered by a clerical administrative approach that never even knows the names of the agency social workers paid a couple of hundred pounds a day to work as social workers, when those alienated social workers walk along the River Trent with tears in their eyes because they’re not included in the aggressive administration of these powerful surveillance databases managed by admin who become almost like social bullies to the professional staff they support.
They’re seriously depressed from the lack of access to the job they want to do. But the database and the way it’s implemented creates massive social distances between professionals hierarchies of aggressive performative competencies that need calling to account because they’re actually full of prejudice and risk.
When multiagency administrators disappear from the job to type at ninety words a minute but can’t answer the phone or actually speak to people in the neighbourhood because they just don’t see actually speaking to the people they write about as part of the job because they’ve never been properly inducted and trained into the council or the job you begin to understand how privatisation only wants to see its own metrics reflected in the implementation of its software: everything in privatisation is as if it’s being implemented in a post Second World War reconstruction moment: all is always on a need to know basis.
When we consider the harms of privatisation (the acres of warehouse council personal data scattered across the country now: it’s about an unhealthy and disrespectful attitude to people, especially other people, learning and knowledge an assumption that all technology will and can do is reproduce whatever problems we already have rather than use the tech to develop new knowledge and insight which is vital if you’re working in a service.
We have the current problems with corruption inside and outside local authorities and councils because of the last forty years of cutting at the same time privatising, taking the heart and motivation and purpose out of services. We have a cultural dementia because we’ve privatised meaning fragmented continuities across services and lifespans in spaces that may not be there tomorrow. (What was in that warehouse? Case notes from 1987? who actually cares enough to value the past, present and future in the privatising spaces?
Software across all services needs to be in-house built on the architecture of council history but for a modern future. The multi agency support hubs could be a really powerful tool of democracy but the aggressive, embedded performance demanding depersonalisation rather than real insight is a result of privatisation.
Ironically, it’s not in the ‘deep state’ where predators and risk is manufactured but deep inside the segmented, isolated, aggressively competitive precarious working of multi agency teams focussing on a database not properly understood or implemented for democratic development or accountable process with future in it for the clients.
The demand requirements of the system, persons of interest, more and more relationships across the troubled family landscape knowledge beyond any sense of GDPR for or hope of citizenship or recuperation for these people: the whole purpose is that they’re on the database.
I’d worry about the lack of actual understanding of the contexts of the people who are surveilled actually leads to more corruption and harm of people who are themselves at risk: when we think about how social workers allow a child back into a home where there’s drugs and the data will only explain the immediate risk of the clients, persons of interest what the actual context will not show is that unless the actual context is properly known ie the risks of other unknown parties who are exploiting the clients who may be the actual risk to the client’s child but if a child is seriously harmed and killed that information will never have been collected because that contextual possibility isn’t considered. Why don’t we care?
Case closed?
To understand the complexity of exploitation you have to know the area and understand how if we understand the history of the neighbourhood in relation to privatisation instead of criminals you’ll find those ostracised neighbourhoods and communities deliberatively excluded. Ironically deliberative exclusion can be from having access to too much of the wrong kind of prejudiced information in the myriad of databases strangely we don’t ask why we use Experian to tell us about the people we need to be focussing on in the sense of health inequalities when Experian only became Experian through selling cheaply manufactured furniture (Cavendish Woodhouse) on very expensive credit to working class communities, then catalogues to working class people at extortionate credit rates then using that money to create a credit system that excluded the very people who paid for their shiny credit system. Strange old colonial fruit indeed!
To go back to the multi agency databases that are again based and set up in multi agency social service settings on Experian call centre software, if they were implemented as a neighbourhood service resource, properly connected to a sense of recuperation, service and accountability to something beyond the interdisciplinary demands of the professions then we might have a less problematic multiagency system.
We need to understand the harm that privatised technologies in a financialised competitive environment do to people professionals, clients and the understanding of the general public.
Inside the privatised implementation of technology and knowledge and no-one is talking about how admin is cruel because it doesn’t even try to re-enfranchise the financially excluded neighbourhoods that the software that excludes them will continue to exclude them.
One thing, the institutional environment where Police, Hospital, Fire Service, Homelessness, Drug and Alcohol, Social, mental health, Womens Refuge workers come together is cruel, with a kind of Hannah Arendt sense of the banality of the evil: not perhaps as cruel as the neighbourhoods that have been created by forty years of privatisation but still part of this dystopian and disenfranchising disgust at others who are so far gone that they’re not really seen as human (still) in the way that technologies and data are utilised.
NO way back.
The institutional deprivation of councils handing out hundreds of pounds to children on the move on trains from Nottingham to Skegness (all above board, surveilled, monitored) but somewhere in the monitoring and surveillance is the abject wrongness, corruption and risk of these event horizons: a mirror to the causes of the hand to mouth poverty of privatising culture that needs inclusion and modernisation all the way through.
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