Monday, April 27, 2009
YOU CAN SELL AT ALMOST ANY PRICE IF YOU HAVE A SOCIAL AWARENESS PROGRAMME & DISABILITY LIFT
This is a comment somebody put on a thread Douglas Carswell, a Conservative MP with ideas, was doing about the costs of public contracts. It makes it easier to understand why public works are 13 times as expensive as they should be. It also reminds me of one of the very few motions at LibDem conference of which I have actually expressed enthusiastic support. It was to make it easier for small businesses to tender for council contracts & was put up by Antonia Swinson, one of the few people in the party with ideas. It was passed but whether a blind bit of notice of the it becoming officially policy was ever taken of it is a different matter.
Not new - A jobber from Vermont, Jim Fisk by name, during the American civil War "You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you've got the guts to ask."
Fisk had sold a stock of blankets to the War Department at prices three times what the Vermont factory had expected.
My highly successful localised Internet business has been going 10 years now. The ONLY customer we haven't signed up is the local council.
Last year they spent £200,000 on the service we could provide for £5000. The tender documents insisted that we had to be ISO accredited, have a zero carbon certificate, a diversified workforce, disability lifts in our 3rd floor offices, fully documented social awareness programmes, Investors in People certification and full training and development plans.
There are 3 employees in my business ( which includes me).
Not new - A jobber from Vermont, Jim Fisk by name, during the American civil War "You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you've got the guts to ask."
Fisk had sold a stock of blankets to the War Department at prices three times what the Vermont factory had expected.
