What annoys you the most ? - Page 1268

**rupertramjet** · June 22nd, 2018, 06:57 PM

Those PFI debts take a huge lump out of the exchequer every year in service charges, debt repayment, and the like, this was a Labour policy, in most towns there are ongoing problems with these contracts because the deals mean that historic units passed from local control to the new companies as part of the management structures. Which means those private companies can close the old units down, without either local MPs or councilors having any say. Labour privatised £420 Billion of the NHS and signed far more over in ciontracts, The Tories can not privatise the NHS, Blair already did!

Lets not panic though, Blairs folk only signed fifty year deals, so when our Granchildren start their families, the NHS will be back in public hands, oh yeah I forgot, part of the PFI deal is that the buildings and infrastructure remains the property of the PFI funder. So they will probably redevelop all the hospitals they built!

Great deal eh???

**rupertramjet** · June 22nd, 2018, 07:24 PM

Forgot to mention the figures above are only the NHS debt to PFI, there are another £250 Billion to education, local authorities and the emergency services.

Near were Grouchy lives is a state of the art control centre for the Emergency Services, all three said they did not want it, all three said it could not work, and the one trial at one of the other four centres, proved how useless it was, with Emergency Crews in Cornwall being guided by controllers in Hampshire with no Local knowledge, they cost £85 million and only two shifts clock in, the Security and cleaners, the contracts cost at present £10 million a year to maintain and that will increase at an average of 7% every five years until 2040.

**73north** · June 22nd, 2018, 08:42 PM

I hate the guys that listen to music on trains - on their mobile phones using a cheap ear phones set and you can hear that crappy ' techno ' music even a few seats away

Today , I moved to a different part of the train , just to escape it - lord knows what it must do in the long run to their hearing

**Grouchy** · June 22nd, 2018, 09:46 PM

Quote Rupertramjet:
Near were Grouchy lives is a state of the art control centre for the Emergency Services, all three said they did not want it, all three said it could not work, and the one trial at one of the other four centres, proved how useless it was, with Emergency Crews in Cornwall being guided by controllers in Hampshire with no Local knowledge, they cost £85 million and only two shifts clock in, the Security and cleaners, the contracts cost at present £10 million a year to maintain and that will increase at an average of 7% every five years until 2040.

That is correct. What a lot of folks perhaps also don't know is that although these control centres are actually mothballed, the issue of crews being controlled by staff in other parts of the country still exists. At busy periods, emergency calls from my area (north-east England) are routed to Cornwall from where staff attempt to mobilise ambulance and fire crews to incidents.

It is not unusual to see ambulances on blue lights, passing each other going in opposite directions on major roads in the area...

The waste of money is nothing short of obscene.. No wonder that so many cuts are being made on the services. In my own (former) service (Fire) the funding cuts are really biting. For example, the city of Hull used to be served, 24 hours a day, by eleven full-time crewed pumps based at four stations around the city. These were supported by "special" machines such as emergency and rescue tenders and aerial appliances.The number has now been cut to five pumps....

Given that parts of the city are still rated as high risk, one fire could tie up all five pumps on first attendance alone. It has happened. Pity any poor sod whose house catches fire at the same time 'cos no-one will be there quickly...

A number of fire pumps have been withdrawn entirely from some stations and replaced with "first aid" appliances. Basically a pickup truck with a motorised pressure washer on the back! Crew of two so no BA is carried (and absolute minimum of four personnel are required for breathing apparatus to be deployed). One of these turning up at a "persons reported" fire and someone is likely to die...

Sorry - rant mode off.....

As an aside, I can't get the "quote" facility to work on this thread...

**Wendigo** · June 22nd, 2018, 10:21 PM

I think we can all agree that the NHS is heavily targeted by HMG funding, opposition howling from whatever direction is meaningless as we all know that a sizeable amount of the money invested is wasted by pisspoor management. Those of us who work within the organisation will all have examples of lousy funding decisions that defy belief of ordinary workers.
Too often though these fuck ups are driven by Whitehall and followed through by managers who have been pulled in from outside the NHS and who disguise cost cutting as improving services, really no one that works outside the boardroom buys that shit anymore

PFI's are a prime example of gross HMG incompetence, even when it was clear what a total fuck up they were becoming they were powerless to stop them.

The NHS needs to learn to spend and target funding more wisely first.

**rupertramjet** · June 22nd, 2018, 10:42 PM

Sadly this is true across all government departments, Grouchy and I have shared posts on this subject before, and I agree the Emergency Services are poorly managed, the NHS there is no debate, its management are lower than lice, but charities are using 'management speak' too, and many are unable to serve the people they were formed to help, because of ridiculous and contradictory rules.

I held star rank, but my soldiers did the fighting, I had been there too, I was never a private, but I ate the same food, slept in the same holes, and shit in the same bags as my men, I had to pass the same course as them, but do better than them on most of it, because of that, they knew and trusted me, that is not true in so many civilian organisations. The current benefits system is not fit for purpose, surely it is time for all the Whitehall big wigs to serve for at least a year in the front line and learn the reality of the people they are setting the rules for. I once heard a senior civil servant say, 'We need to adopt the Jeremy Kyle test', meaning she took the clowns that appear on that desperate voyeuristic piece of shits show, were to her the real people of our country. They are not! She had left Ox-bridge and gone straight into a government job, but not at the bottom, she came from a good background and lived in the home counties!

A funny story, one of my senior Warrant Officers upset someone from the MOD Procurement team, a notorious bunch of idiots. We had a new vehicle arrive for test, the Sarnt Major asked the guy if he wanted to sit in the drivers seat while he fired a few rounds at the vehicle, when asked why, the good sarnt Major explained that by just looking at the vehicle he could see that the drivers area was vulnerable to small arms fire, every soldier there had seen it, but the procurement guy had not, and neither had the engineers and designers, old saying 'Horses for Courses'

ALL senior Police, Fire and Ambulance Officers used to have to start at the bottom, lets keep it that way, and get the rest of the Government Organisations to follow track!

**CARLTON BROWN** · June 22nd, 2018, 11:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rupertramjet

Sadly this is true across all government departments, Grouchy and I have shared posts on this subject before, and I agree the Emergency Services are poorly managed, the NHS there is no debate, its management are lower than lice, but charities are using 'management speak' too, and many are unable to serve the people they were formed to help, because of ridiculous and contradictory rules.

Totally agree. I know from experience that if you want to get an idea how important government departments function and make decisions - such as the Foreign / Home Office, you only need to see how your local DWP office, or council operates (generally not that well in my experience). The way things are done is much the same across the board.

That aside, the privatisation of general government services is not the answer as many Americans will tell you and things going badly is not what you'd expect at this level in a country like the US, but they do seem to have passed the idea across to us.

This following report is a few years old, but things are now much worse:

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ional-facility

What I do worry about is the the next stage with the NHS, who may start turning over general practices to companies like Virgin Care or Crapita. This is already happening and it will be a disaster if it goes much further.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/...ue-bournemouth

**buttsie** · June 23rd, 2018, 01:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 73north

I hate the guys that listen to music on trains - on their mobile phones using a cheap ear phones set and you can hear that crappy ' techno ' music even a few seats away

Today , I moved to a different part of the train , just to escape it - lord knows what it must do in the long run to their hearing

Earplugs or get your own device to drown theres out was always my favoured solution to the thump thump thump

They've been doing that since the Walkman back in the 70s was created
Back then it was heavy metal & punk you could hear

Loud noise close up can damage but its got to be for a long time on music devices

Real hearing loss occurs more often than not in the workplace

My father as a fire brigade captain is as deaf as a door post without his hearing aids and other modern marvels in both ears because he spent 20 years being woken up by the Alarm which he slept next to - makes the headphone music sound quiet by comparison.

He never wore a pair of head phones in his life

Quote:

Originally Posted by rupertramjet

Sadly this is true across all government departments, Grouchy and I have shared posts on this subject before, and I agree the Emergency Services are poorly managed, the NHS there is no debate, its management are lower than lice, but charities are using 'management speak' too, and many are unable to serve the people they were formed to help, because of ridiculous and contradictory rules.

Not forgetting they made a show about incompetence decades ago

Yes Minister

**Grouchy** · June 23rd, 2018, 09:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rupertramjet

ALL senior Police, Fire and Ambulance Officers used to have to start at the bottom......

Thankfully, still a requirement in the fire service thanks (in part) to the refusal by the Fire Brigades Union to accept "graduate entry".

I rose to senior rank but started at the bottom as a "smoke eater". The early experiences I had and the stuff I learned on the fireground set me in good stead for later when I held rank and had the responsibility of directing crews in dangerous situations. I had some empathy with those firefighters.

The police in the UK have a graduate entry scheme whereby an officer can come in at up to Inspector level! That, to my mind, is madness.

I understand the ambulance service has a good record of promotion from below but does accept entry into it's management structure from those with no street experience.. It is, however, noted for being a "top heavy" service.
I have a friend, a bloody good paramedic, who started at the bottom as a trainee working on front line ambulances. The service spent vast amounts of money on his training and he gained well-deserved promotion through the ranks only to end up shuffling paper in a back room office. What a waste...

Another aside - a little known silly fact of the day...
The ambulance service is not actually an emergency service.. it is an "essential" service. This anomaly comes about due to the way it is funded and managed... Unlike the police and fire services it is not controlled or even regulated in any way by central government but by the local authorities.

**73north** · June 23rd, 2018, 10:08 AM

I rose to Band 6 - as an Operating Theatre worker - in the NHS - Anaesthetics
from August 1987 till October 2016 , when I left and took early retirement ( at 50 )
in disgust at the way I was being treated by Management , over getting put into redeployment ( I refused to drop my band to 5 and lose money ) .

There were insane cuts to the existing workforce - called RE-DESIGN (a misnomer )
where 1/3 of the existing staff ( that were Band 5 and 6's ) were removed to other jobs in the NHS , and other NHS Band 5's on redeployment were moved to Theatre , despite never working there , or really wanting to work there - also Band 4's were employed to work in Theatre , that had never worked there and needed to be trained .

needless to say , it was chaos , horrific skill levels , and really stressful , when you are one of the few left that know what you are doing - and having to work twice as hard to cover - and stop mistakes happening -
you have to experience this , to know what I mean here , exhausting .

The stupid thing was they cut too much , so they didn't have enough Anaesthetic Staff - so ended up paying a FORTUNE for 1 Agency worker , full time for 2 years !!
This was costing them £ 50 per hour , so you can see this was not a bright move .

I ended up ( trust me this is totally true ) working 4 out of 5 weekends , and doing a 3 night night-shift , every 2 weeks , and getting only one day to recover .
Needless to say , I was tired and depressed , I had little spare time or social time .
I finally had enough and left with a pension .

I now work Agency , earn £ 25 per hour , and have every weekend off and work a few days a week , and actually see the sunshine - and enjoy myself and spend cash on my hobbies . I am actually better off , now , than when I worked full-time back in 2016 !!

View Poll Results: What really annoys you the most ?
Other drivers	249	14.77%
Loud neighbours	356	21.12%
Womens expectations	155	9.19%
Queue jumpers	182	10.79%
Someone not paying their round	61	3.62%
My inadequate organ	36	2.14%
Income tax	147	8.72%
This thread	70	4.15%
Everything	430	25.50%
Voters: 1686. You may not vote on this poll

June 22nd, 2018, 10:21 PM	#12675
Wendigo Former Staff Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Blighty Posts: 113,915 Thanks: 260,016 Thanked 1,140,671 Times in 114,035 Posts	I think we can all agree that the NHS is heavily targeted by HMG funding, opposition howling from whatever direction is meaningless as we all know that a sizeable amount of the money invested is wasted by pisspoor management. Those of us who work within the organisation will all have examples of lousy funding decisions that defy belief of ordinary workers. Too often though these fuck ups are driven by Whitehall and followed through by managers who have been pulled in from outside the NHS and who disguise cost cutting as improving services, really no one that works outside the boardroom buys that shit anymore PFI's are a prime example of gross HMG incompetence, even when it was clear what a total fuck up they were becoming they were powerless to stop them. The NHS needs to learn to spend and target funding more wisely first. __________________ RIP Doctor Who To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 0 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. 23 November 1963 to 25 December 2017, sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. The show is dead to me, but my DVD's live on If you can re-up dead links please consider adding this to your signature. It helps when looking at reports of dead posts. Please PM me re any dead images although it is likely if it is outside Celebs I may no longer have the content

June 22nd, 2018, 06:57 PM	#12671
rupertramjet R.I.P. Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Cloud cuckoo land Posts: 4,300 Thanks: 26,852 Thanked 54,117 Times in 4,288 Posts	Those PFI debts take a huge lump out of the exchequer every year in service charges, debt repayment, and the like, this was a Labour policy, in most towns there are ongoing problems with these contracts because the deals mean that historic units passed from local control to the new companies as part of the management structures. Which means those private companies can close the old units down, without either local MPs or councilors having any say. Labour privatised £420 Billion of the NHS and signed far more over in ciontracts, The Tories can not privatise the NHS, Blair already did! Lets not panic though, Blairs folk only signed fifty year deals, so when our Granchildren start their families, the NHS will be back in public hands, oh yeah I forgot, part of the PFI deal is that the buildings and infrastructure remains the property of the PFI funder. So they will probably redevelop all the hospitals they built! Great deal eh???

June 22nd, 2018, 07:24 PM	#12672
rupertramjet R.I.P. Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Cloud cuckoo land Posts: 4,300 Thanks: 26,852 Thanked 54,117 Times in 4,288 Posts	Forgot to mention the figures above are only the NHS debt to PFI, there are another £250 Billion to education, local authorities and the emergency services. Near were Grouchy lives is a state of the art control centre for the Emergency Services, all three said they did not want it, all three said it could not work, and the one trial at one of the other four centres, proved how useless it was, with Emergency Crews in Cornwall being guided by controllers in Hampshire with no Local knowledge, they cost £85 million and only two shifts clock in, the Security and cleaners, the contracts cost at present £10 million a year to maintain and that will increase at an average of 7% every five years until 2040.

June 22nd, 2018, 08:42 PM	#12673
73north Veteran Member Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Scottish Borders Posts: 1,890 Thanks: 16,324 Thanked 39,387 Times in 1,847 Posts	I hate the guys that listen to music on trains - on their mobile phones using a cheap ear phones set and you can hear that crappy ' techno ' music even a few seats away Today , I moved to a different part of the train , just to escape it - lord knows what it must do in the long run to their hearing

June 22nd, 2018, 09:46 PM	#12674
Grouchy Vintage Member Join Date: Sep 2010 Posts: 396 Thanks: 6,252 Thanked 4,389 Times in 372 Posts	Quote Rupertramjet: Near were Grouchy lives is a state of the art control centre for the Emergency Services, all three said they did not want it, all three said it could not work, and the one trial at one of the other four centres, proved how useless it was, with Emergency Crews in Cornwall being guided by controllers in Hampshire with no Local knowledge, they cost £85 million and only two shifts clock in, the Security and cleaners, the contracts cost at present £10 million a year to maintain and that will increase at an average of 7% every five years until 2040. That is correct. What a lot of folks perhaps also don't know is that although these control centres are actually mothballed, the issue of crews being controlled by staff in other parts of the country still exists. At busy periods, emergency calls from my area (north-east England) are routed to Cornwall from where staff attempt to mobilise ambulance and fire crews to incidents. It is not unusual to see ambulances on blue lights, passing each other going in opposite directions on major roads in the area... The waste of money is nothing short of obscene.. No wonder that so many cuts are being made on the services. In my own (former) service (Fire) the funding cuts are really biting. For example, the city of Hull used to be served, 24 hours a day, by eleven full-time crewed pumps based at four stations around the city. These were supported by "special" machines such as emergency and rescue tenders and aerial appliances.The number has now been cut to five pumps.... Given that parts of the city are still rated as high risk, one fire could tie up all five pumps on first attendance alone. It has happened. Pity any poor sod whose house catches fire at the same time 'cos no-one will be there quickly... A number of fire pumps have been withdrawn entirely from some stations and replaced with "first aid" appliances. Basically a pickup truck with a motorised pressure washer on the back! Crew of two so no BA is carried (and absolute minimum of four personnel are required for breathing apparatus to be deployed). One of these turning up at a "persons reported" fire and someone is likely to die... Sorry - rant mode off..... As an aside, I can't get the "quote" facility to work on this thread...

June 22nd, 2018, 10:42 PM	#12676
rupertramjet R.I.P. Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Cloud cuckoo land Posts: 4,300 Thanks: 26,852 Thanked 54,117 Times in 4,288 Posts	Sadly this is true across all government departments, Grouchy and I have shared posts on this subject before, and I agree the Emergency Services are poorly managed, the NHS there is no debate, its management are lower than lice, but charities are using 'management speak' too, and many are unable to serve the people they were formed to help, because of ridiculous and contradictory rules. I held star rank, but my soldiers did the fighting, I had been there too, I was never a private, but I ate the same food, slept in the same holes, and shit in the same bags as my men, I had to pass the same course as them, but do better than them on most of it, because of that, they knew and trusted me, that is not true in so many civilian organisations. The current benefits system is not fit for purpose, surely it is time for all the Whitehall big wigs to serve for at least a year in the front line and learn the reality of the people they are setting the rules for. I once heard a senior civil servant say, 'We need to adopt the Jeremy Kyle test', meaning she took the clowns that appear on that desperate voyeuristic piece of shits show, were to her the real people of our country. They are not! She had left Ox-bridge and gone straight into a government job, but not at the bottom, she came from a good background and lived in the home counties! A funny story, one of my senior Warrant Officers upset someone from the MOD Procurement team, a notorious bunch of idiots. We had a new vehicle arrive for test, the Sarnt Major asked the guy if he wanted to sit in the drivers seat while he fired a few rounds at the vehicle, when asked why, the good sarnt Major explained that by just looking at the vehicle he could see that the drivers area was vulnerable to small arms fire, every soldier there had seen it, but the procurement guy had not, and neither had the engineers and designers, old saying 'Horses for Courses' ALL senior Police, Fire and Ambulance Officers used to have to start at the bottom, lets keep it that way, and get the rest of the Government Organisations to follow track!

June 23rd, 2018, 10:08 AM	#12680
73north Veteran Member Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Scottish Borders Posts: 1,890 Thanks: 16,324 Thanked 39,387 Times in 1,847 Posts	I rose to Band 6 - as an Operating Theatre worker - in the NHS - Anaesthetics from August 1987 till October 2016 , when I left and took early retirement ( at 50 ) in disgust at the way I was being treated by Management , over getting put into redeployment ( I refused to drop my band to 5 and lose money ) . There were insane cuts to the existing workforce - called RE-DESIGN (a misnomer ) where 1/3 of the existing staff ( that were Band 5 and 6's ) were removed to other jobs in the NHS , and other NHS Band 5's on redeployment were moved to Theatre , despite never working there , or really wanting to work there - also Band 4's were employed to work in Theatre , that had never worked there and needed to be trained . needless to say , it was chaos , horrific skill levels , and really stressful , when you are one of the few left that know what you are doing - and having to work twice as hard to cover - and stop mistakes happening - you have to experience this , to know what I mean here , exhausting . The stupid thing was they cut too much , so they didn't have enough Anaesthetic Staff - so ended up paying a FORTUNE for 1 Agency worker , full time for 2 years !! This was costing them £ 50 per hour , so you can see this was not a bright move . I ended up ( trust me this is totally true ) working 4 out of 5 weekends , and doing a 3 night night-shift , every 2 weeks , and getting only one day to recover . Needless to say , I was tired and depressed , I had little spare time or social time . I finally had enough and left with a pension . I now work Agency , earn £ 25 per hour , and have every weekend off and work a few days a week , and actually see the sunshine - and enjoy myself and spend cash on my hobbies . I am actually better off , now , than when I worked full-time back in 2016 !!