How to Not Run a Contract
I was at a police station recently on a Friday night. The detainees were remanded for court in the morning. The officer spent over twenty minutes trying to speak to someone at Capita but could only access a recorded message. If I were Capita's MD and wished to improve my company's overnight remand statistics, I would man every phone available between 7pm and 11pm, particularly on a Friday. On the other hand, maybe the MD has got every line manned. Maybe the MD just doesn't have many phones. Poor thing.
There again, if a conscientious Police officer cannot speak to a real person, are they going to make a booking by leaving a voicemail, thereby risking no one picks up the message? Quite possibly not. So either they give up & let the court clerk deal with it (by adjourning it off), or, in the case of at least one (conscientious) Police Force, they book the interpreter themselves. The interpreter is then paid by the Police for the Court hearing. This means that (a) there is no failure statistic recorded against Capita (no booking was made) and (b) the payment of the interpreter does not appear in the MoJ's statistics for out-of-contract spend (always assuming the MoJ is conscientiously compiling these statistics).
Of course neither the MoJ nor Capita, can possibly be expected to have foreseen such a train of consequences. After all, only the Delphic Oracle ever possessed 20/20 foresight.
