Scaremongering?

That was Mark Hoban's response to the Public Accounts Committee's roasting of the DWP for the misery caused by Atos.  The BBC reports it straightforwardly.  Margaret Hodge put the blame on the DWP rather than on the company, saying that it regarded the appeals process as an inherent part of the system, when it was actually damaging vulnerable people.  Hoban replied that they'd failed to recognise that changes had been made and that independent reports said that the whole thing was fundamentally sound.  Mind you, according to a tweet by Jonty Olliff-Cooper, Hoban has described Jobcentres as "the last vestige of the command and control economy", so are we to expect that they will soon be handed over for private profit?  (JOC calls this comment "pretty fruity from a minister", which must be public school speak for something I don't understand.)

There's an excellent article by Zoe Williams in the Guardian yesterday, in which she describes the "shadow state" created by the outsourcing of public services.  I won't quote from it because you need to read the whole of it.  Last week another Guardian article by Toby Lowe described payment by results as "a dangerous idiocy that makes staff tell lies".  Again, spot on.  And if we needed any more practical examples of how things can go spectacularly wrong, there's the report from the Commons Justice Committee on the "shambolic" situation with court translation services (something Private Eye has been going on about for ages) and the Care Quality Commission's report into Serco's out-of-hours doctor service in Cornwall, which failed the sick by not having enough staff to answer calls.

But all of this is presumably just scaremongering.