The Cape of Good Hope

It’s Soapbox Thursday. I live on a soapbox and right now am falling asleep on one. On several, actually. I’m lucky like that. Plenty of space.
 
Let’s see how brief I can make this. My job is to find, arrange or create training to help people who have been unemployed a long time, for reasons of homelessness, addiction or offending - or a combination - and who have decided they want to make a change in their lives and find work. Our organisation, a charity/social enterprise, therefore has contact with the drug and alcohol services, with probation and with the council’s learning service, amongst others.
 
The previous contracted-out drug and alcohol providers lost the contract and a new organisation took over at the beginning of April. Probation has recently been privatised and split in two (serious and not-so-serious offenders). In Oxfordshire the adult learning services have been contracted out to an FE college, in principle from last week but now deferred till June.
 
In a nutshell, there are many staff inefficiently, confusedly and unhappily changing jobs and acquiring new managers who do not know how things work locally; there are many databases not working, many systems not in place. Politely, it’s a shambles.
 
Right now I’m looking back fondly to when public services were provided by the public sector and the worst we could expect around the end of the financial year was a request to put in bids for a bit of money left over.
 
Efficiency savings, anyone?

This picture is the back of a pub called The Cape of Good Hope and we all know what happens there.