Letter: Severn Trent and efficient working
Thursday 10th February 2011, 8:18AM GMT.
Letter: At a time when everyone should be seeking to improve efficiency and savings, Severn Trent still has a long way to go.
On January 4, two men in a van parked outside my house and, with the engine running, sat there for three hours before driving off.
The next day the same van returned and a square hole was cut around my stop tap because the council had apparently identified it as a health and safety hazard.
I asked one of the men to explain and he agreed that the cover appeared to be exactly the same as others in the area, none of which had been listed for replacement.
They were unable to do the work the day before because “the man bringing the safety barriers had failed to turn up”, resulting in an 80-mile round trip from Birmingham on each visit.
Two days later a lorry fitted with a digger arrived to finish the work off. Their part of the task was to make good the square hole cut by the original team which they did by using half a shovel full of tarmac, beaten down with the back of a spade. They then kicked the debris on to the road.
It begs the question why the first team couldn’t have spared another 10 minutes to have completed the task, then taken their equipment away, saving what will presumably be a third visit at some time by a specialist team of “barrier-fetchers”.
Three weeks later the two barriers, a large plastic cover and a sign are still awaiting collection.
M Williams
Wem
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You’ll probably find they’re on a fixed price five year contract, so nobody really cares about the efficiency per individual job. The contractor takes the hit for the inefficiency you witnessed, not Severn Trent, and they would likely recover costs incurred from the subcontractor who failed to show at the appointed time.
On the face of it, it seems crazy to pay large amounts of money to contractors when the work could be done by in-house teams, but the flip side is that in-house teams still need to be paid (and buildings / equipment maintained and replaced) even when there’s no work to be done, so the contracting route can actually work out more cost effective in the long run because the contractors are working to capacity for more than one customer, i.e. more efficient use of labour, equipment, and so on.
Oh, regarding the barriers that have been left outside… call me cynical, but it’s cheaper for them to “store” them there (and fetch them when they need them) than to store them in a warehouse :-)
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M. Williams has discovered a type of organisation even more inefficient than the usual suspects – it’s “The Private Monopoly”.
In common with all organisations that have no competition, it is greedy, bloated and inefficient.
Time for the law to be changed so that we can change water suppliers, just like we change gas and electricity.
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