No profit in pain

If enough of us keep banging on about this, eventually something will change, right?

The essentials:
2020 – Serco (underlying annual profit in 2019 £120.5 million, estimated underlying profit in 2020 £163m) awarded a contract initially worth £108 million as part of the UK government’s test and trace programme for Covid-19 infection monitoring. The contract was awarded under special procurement rules under which there was no competitive tendering and no public tender advertisement. The outcome? Hopeless contact tracing rates, delays contacting people who may have been exposed to Covid-19, data protection breaches, and recruitment of inexperienced staff who appear to have either ended up sitting around with little to do or lacking the skills required to properly deal with the complexities of contact tracing. Apparently not bad enough to prevent the contract being renewed last September.
2021 – Announced that Serco added around £400 million to its revenues from Covid-19 services and that dividends totalling £17 million are due to be paid to its shareholders.

Oh and by the way, Edward Argar MP, the Health Minister was previously Head of Public Affairs at, yeah you guessed it, Serco.

And don’t tell me the public sector isn’t up to it. Look at the NHS-run vaccination programme or the great work done by local councils across the country to pick up the pieces from the government’s test and trace shambles.

The whole sorry mess of Serco’s involvement in the NHS can be found here on the excellent, if slightly depressing, NHS For Sale website.

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“A lot of my songs deal in lyrical abstraction, but as the NHS has had such a profound effect on every aspect of my life since birth, this was a commission that I felt duty-bound to throw myself into. The title, ‘No Profit In Pain’, is an attempt to counter the mentality of platitudes like “no pain no gain” and “tough love” that are peddled by zealous free-marketeers.

The NHS is something that we can too easily take for granted. I’ve twice toured with musicians in America when they’ve had broken limbs and not been able to afford treatment. Each time, they had to continue touring in pain in cramped vans, using homemade splints and slings. It’s a precarious way to live if you don’t have insurance.

The NHS has been there for me throughout my life and has saved many of my family members’ lives. It means more than anything I could ever hope to convey in a melodramatic synth-pop power ballad. For the song (recorded with Kliph Scurlock on drums and Llion Robertson producing), I focused on the battle to keep the NHS as a free service in public ownership. There’s loads of swearing in it. Privatisation is creeping in and it will be a death knell for the NHS if we are not vigilant. As a devolved issue in Wales, and as an idea that was born here, the idea of a free health service for all serves as a beacon of what we can achieve as a nation and is something we must pass on intact to future generations.

I namecheck a trio of Welsh healthcare pioneers in the song – Aneurin Bevan, William Price and Betsi Cadwaladr – but I’m just scratching the surface. I can’t ever hope to contribute to society what NHS staff do on a daily basis. But I do write songs, and while I don’t expect it to be to everybody’s taste, this is my heartfelt if feeble attempt to pay them some respect.”

The words of Gruff Rhys. Top bloke.