• Complain

White - Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain

Here you can read online White - Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Great Britain, year: 2016, publisher: Oneworld Publications, genre: Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

White Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain
  • Book:
    Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Oneworld Publications
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2016
  • City:
    Great Britain
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

About the Author; Contents; Prologue; 1 The Story of Britains Outsourcing Revolution; 2 The Asylum Industry; 3 Disabilities and Employment; 4 Selling Off Lady Justice; 5 NHS for Sale?; 6 The Trouble with Social Care; 7 Accountability; 8 Transparency; 9 Lobbying and Conflicts of Interest; 10 Market Failure; 11 Conclusion -- What Is to Be Done?; Notes; Index.;Every year the British government spends 80 billion outsourcing public services. Today, private companies are responsible for fulfilling some of the most sensitive and important roles of the state - running prisons and providing healthcare, transport, legal aid, even child protection. These organizations have been handed enormous amounts of power and yet for the most part they operate with no transparency or accountability. From deportations to NHS cutbacks, Alan White exposes what goes wrong when the invisible hand of the market is introduced into public services. Informed by exclusive interviews with senior managers, campaigners and whistle-blowers, Shadow State is the first book to examine the controversial phenomenon of government outsourcing. Not only does White provide the full story behind scandals involving G4S, Serco and ATOS, but he also reveals previously unknown cases of system failure in areas such as social care, welfare and justice. The picture that develops is deeply troubling.

White: author's other books


Who wrote Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

About the Author

Alan White is UK Breaking News Reporter at Buzzfeed News. He has written for The Times , Guardian , Private Eye and the TLS , amongst other publications. His series of articles, The Shadow State, ran on the New Statesman website and were amongst its most read pieces. He lives in London.

A Oneworld Book First published in Great Britain North America and - photo 1

A Oneworld Book

First published in Great Britain, North America and

Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2016

This ebook published by Oneworld Publications, 2016

Copyright Alan White 2016

The moral right of Alan White to be identified as the Author of this

work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved

Copyright under Berne Convention

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78074-574-9

eISBN 978-1-78074-575-6

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Oneworld Publications

10 Bloomsbury Street

London WC1B 3SR

England

To Fran and Zachary Contents Prologue The 2012 Olympics Security Fiasco - photo 2

To Fran and Zachary

Contents

Prologue

The 2012 Olympics Security Fiasco

On 24 May 2012, BBCs North-West Tonight programme carried a little-noticed story about G4S, the company that had been brought in to provide security staff for the Olympic Games. The show reported that a whistleblower had been escorted from her place of work after claiming employees had taken shortcuts in their vetting procedures. She said the system was struggling because of the need to process thousands of applications ahead of the Games: staff had to get through a minimum of ten applications an hour and the documents had ended up piled in corners of the office in Stockton-on-Tees. The woman, Sarah Hubble, told the programme: It was an absolute shambles you had people vetting potential employees who had not been vetted themselves. She added that she had never received a criminal records check herself.

On 2 June 2012, the Daily Mail would report: After the report was screened on the television news, Miss Hubble, who was employed through employment agency Reed, said she was quizzed for two-and-a-half hours by several G4S directors. After initially denying she contacted the media, Miss Hubble said she admitted it was her when the company found evidence of her contact with a journalist on her phone, which bosses examined in detail. Sarah Hubble was escorted from the building and told not to return.

A couple of weeks later, The Sun ran another story about G4Ss Olympics work. It claimed hundreds of sniffer dog searches for explosives at the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London, had not been carried out. The operation was meant to stop terrorists smuggling a bomb into the site in a vehicle and setting it to detonate on a long-term timer. But the paper alleged that for three years, G4S ghosted the searches of traffic entering the park. It said names of dog handlers on their days off were allegedly put down on shift rotas so it looked like they were working, but no searches took place. A source told the paper: The point about the searches was to stop someone smuggling a bomb inside. But the reality is a lot of the searches that were meant to happen didnt take place because the dogs and their handlers were only shown on paperwork and were never actually there. This has not just happened once or twice but regularly over the past three years. It is a farce.

The paper reported that the alleged deception may have been carried out to avoid a 500 fine which LOcog (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Games organizing body) would impose for every shift G4S could not cover. Two senior managers of the G4S dog section, Keith Francis and Ron Anderson, were suspended by the company while it carried out an internal probe.

It would be too much to suggest that these stories were warning signs for what was to come. But they do introduce two themes well encounter again and again when we look at the outsourcing business: lack of transparency in the first case, and incentives to game the system in the second.

In 2011, G4S was made the official security services provider for London 2012. The intention was for it to provide training and management for the 10,000-strong security workforce, of whom 2,000 would be new staff recruited and trained by G4S and the remaining 8,000 would be from other sources. London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton said the firm would help ensure security provisions were robust and of the highest professionalism.

But the announcement of the contract still caused concern. The group had been implicated in a number of scandals in recent years, perhaps most notably the death of Angolan immigrant Jimmy Mubenga on a plane two years earlier after three G4S security guards had pinned his head down while attempting to restrain him during his deportation. There were concerns about the training and accountability of G4S employees. Was such widespread use of private security really a good idea? But these gripes came from the usual voices: campaign groups, predominantly on the political left.

In December that year, the government announced that the number of security guards for the Games would rise to 23,700 more than double Locog s original estimate of 10,000. The number of security staff that G4S was contracted to provide had risen from the original 2,000 to 10,400. Its part of the contract was now worth 284 million, and the overall cost of security for the Olympics had risen from 282 million to 553 million. This was widely reported in the media. What wasnt was the fact that Locog and the Home Office were concerned about the development of the security operation from an early stage. However, perhaps this was natural, given the scale of the operation the concerns werent focused on G4S specifically, but on the overall project including volunteers, the police and the armed forces.

In August 2011, Theresa May, the home secretary, commissioned Her Majestys Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) to conduct a review of the security arrangements. A month later, the report was produced, and it found some serious problems. Locog was eighteen months behind in producing its security policies and standard operating procedures, which was having a knock-on effect on its delivery of venue security plans. This, in turn, was causing delays in establishing an accurate picture of the number of staff that would be required.

Sir Denis OConnor, HM chief inspector of constabulary, summed up the findings: This plan is not detailed enough at this point. [ Locog ] have had a lot of other things to do. It is now time to have a detailed plan so that the numbers make sense, the roles are clear, and you can recruit and train people with an end in mind. A second report was commissioned in February 2012.

But there was more we didnt know. In addition to the two HMIC reports asked for by the Home Office, wed later find out that Locog had commissioned two reports of its own. In December 2011 it had asked the accountancy firm KPMG to produce an internal audit report, and, more significantly, it had commissioned a report by the accountants Deloitte in May 2012. This second report had been commissioned because Locog was concerned about the quality of the management information it was getting from G4S and about the way that company was communicating with its applicants. And as it turned out, Deloitte identified serious problems with G4Ss management information and its overall operation: The current management information provided by G4S is fragmented, inconsistent and of variable levels of integrity in respect of sources, ownership and management... it is difficult to offer a high degree of confidence that end data figures provided in final reports to Locog provide an accurate picture of reality. The report also criticized G4Ss communications with its applicants and recruits, indicating that its approach lacked detail, did not provide an understanding of the key messages which needed to be communicated at each stage, and was failing to address high attrition rates by engaging effectively with applicants.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain»

Look at similar books to Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain»

Discussion, reviews of the book Shadow state: inside the secret companies that run Britain and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.