On 4 Feb 2025 22:25:33 GMT, Gordon <
Gordon@leaf.net.nz> wrote:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/540918/wellington-water-boss-admits-relying-too-much-on-contractors-requests-more-funding
Experience is a hard but fair teacher as the saying goes.
It is good to see that the CEO, Pat Dougherty, has thrown away the weasel >words and admitted the old business model has failed to the some extent as >the network itself. The workers on the ground have been saying for many
moons that the old model was resulting in poor value for money.
"He apologised to the council and acknowledged many of the councils across >the region had been telling Wellington Water it relied too heavily on >contractors.
"You were right and I'm sorry it's taken so long for the message to be >heard."
Regrettably the lesson has not been learned by everyone - Chris Bishop
is determined to both reduce the number of state houses, but also to
get more done through private contractors.
You may remember the fights over public transport some years ago.
Wellington for example at one stage ran trams - there was a single
system for lines and power - using private companies to run them would
have not given any advantage. But after trams were replaced by busses,
a past National Party Transport Minister decided that contracts for
running busses should be opened up to private operators, and went even
further to dictate that the awarding of contracts should be solely on
price, and that a tender could be made for all or any part of the
system - so Wellington ended up with at least three operators, one of
which went broke, who used different systems for keeping records,
leading to the Council not being able to plan changes to routes as
they were no longer able to get data on customer usage for different
routes. It became a shambles, and then National lost an election, but
it ended up costing the Council more than it should have, and
customers not getting as good a service as they deserved.
There was a similar issue with rubbish collections - the insistence on
using small contractors means that on some roads there are three or
four trucks picking up rubbish on a particular road, with
corresponding loss of efficiency and added damage to roads.
Most large companies use their own employees for core business, but
may use contractors for short term tasks or specialist tasks where
they cannot justify training people for short term tasks.
So for Wellington Water, most of the job is either designing and
specifying improvements - Engineers and Architects etc are need for
that, and the system is big enough to employ some - but most of the
work is either construction and pipe additions, replacements and
repairs. Using contractors has just meant they have a bigger training
problem, and the inevitable need to monitor contracts and negotiate
variations etc - we go back to core business is usually best provided
by employees with common training and experience.
So we are getting back to the sort of balance that Councils want -
lower overheads with better control over the bulk of operations. Sadly conservative (ie National-led) councils like to push profit to their
mates instead of operating efficiently; and it can take time to back
out of expensive contracts . . .
So well done to Wellington Water!
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