Edinburgh care tender 'disgrace' exposed. Were the figures fiddled for cheapest bidders?

UNISON's Edinburgh Branch will challenge the council tomorrow to come clean on a leaked independent report that exposes serious flaws in care tenders that led to the quality element in the lowest bids being boosted at the expense of higher cost contracts.

In the wake of £250,000 wasted by the council on the flawed bid to re-tender care services for vulnerable people, the Branch has now called on the Council to halt its 'new business model' outsourcing plans - the biggest sell-off Scottish local government has ever seen - and open up the books on its figures.

The re-tendering covered services for 800 adults. So incensed were they at the forced change of trusted carers tht 80% opted to move to 'direct payments' to employ carers of their choice.

Now an £80,000 report from Deloitte has exposed major flaws in the whole process. The local Evening News newspaper reports:-

"During a tender process, the council sets up separate teams to investigate the quality and price aspects of the bids. It then uses the separate findings to allow it to ensure that the contract is awarded on the basis of 70 per cent quality and 30 per cent price.

"But the Deloitte report – which the council tried to keep out of the public eye but was leaked to the Evening News – highlighted that two of the seven staff in the quality team "had access to price information".

This resulted in "the quality scores relating to lower priced bids to be increased and higher priced bids to be decreased".

Does that then mean that the process was fiddled to prefer the lowest bidders?

The UNISON Branch would not go that far until it had seen the full report but Branch President John Stevenson said, "The Evening News clearly has a report showing that the whole process was flawed. That report needs to be published if there is to be any transparency in the Council's sell-off plans. Otherwise how can we believe any of the claims the council is making about outsourcing?"
http://www.unison-edinburgh.org.uk/news/2010/0302.html

"There is a common sense doubt that most people must have. If services are delivered in-house with no need to make a profit, how can they be delivered more cheaply while making a profit on top?

"Something has to give and that is usually the quality of the service or indeed the whole service - along with any decency in the pay and conditions of those delivering the service.

"You still pay your taxes but instead of the money going on the service and those who deliver it, it goes to company profits. That is a disgrace and it is time for the council to come clean".

Watch this space!