Did ‘body parts stockpile’ firm come unstuck because of an unrealistically-low bid for the contract?
Skwawkbox found this report, suggesting the contractor’s bid was too low.
Fellow left media site Skwawkbox has uncovered a new aspect of the ‘body parts stockpile’ scandal – that private firm Healthcare Environmental Services’ bid for the contract was unrealistically low.
It would be easy to lay all the blame for the current situation on the company – but if it is a money problem, it really is just another symptom of the Conservative government’s mania for providing public services on the cheap, no matter how bad the service then turns out to be.
Private companies make their bids artificially low – because they know the lowest bid will get the contract.
And then the contractor fails to do the job because the money it requested isn’t enough.
You’d have thought the Tories would have learned their lesson from Carillion.
They should have reviewed all private contracts after that fiasco.
If they didn’t, this scandal is less the fault of the company than the government.
ADDITIONAL: It seems a criminal investigation has been launched into the behaviour of Healthcare Environmental Services after the Environment Agency said the company had breached environmental permits.
It seems I was right: The Tory government is trying to blame the contractor for a scandal they caused themselves.
A private firm with a public contract for disposing of clinical waste has been unable to execute its contract in a ‘timely’ fashion, leading to a ‘pile up‘ of hundreds of tonnes of human body parts and other waste.
But the Department of Health’s management organisation for the English NHS, NHS England (NHSE), was told well over a year ago that the price bid by the winning contractor, Healthcare Environmental Services (HES) was ‘abnormally low‘ – and it went to court to defeat a legal bid to overturn the contract award.
Another firm that competed in the tender, Stericycle (then called SRCL), lodged a complaint that the winning bidder had put in a price that was unrealistically low. Stericycle’s legal action was an attempt to overturn the award – but was defeated in the High Court in July.
Source: Govt was warned body-parts firm’s bid was unrealistically low | The SKWAWKBOX
back in the day, bidding corruption used to be called ‘brown envelopes’ these days we don’t even pretend..
Privatisation is a recipe for corruption, inefficiency and, not forgetting, an opportunity for the Tories and their chums to make a lot of money at public expense.