At the Speak Up For Public Services rally back in January, I heard an interesting point made in a speech by Doug Nichols of the CYWU. He said we often forget that the reason we have public services, run by the state, is that most of these originally started as voluntary efforts. After a while, it became obvious that you couldn’t coherently run a national system from a hundreds of local voluntary endeavours, so the state stepped in, and we got state-run policing, education, hospitals and so on.

This, he said, gave him pause whenever he heard of more and more local state services being transfered out to be managed by the voluntary sector. He worried that fracturing services in this way (along with more obvious privatisation) would result in services losing the scope to be consistent and efficient that nationalisation had brought them so long ago.

I was thinking of this whilst reading Jon Rogers‘ post on the ongoing dispute at Fremantle. Whilst not wanting to tar all voluntary or private sector provided services with this rather simplistic brush, the debacle going on in Barnet at the moment certainly highlights this potential for losing the service’s much needed consistency and efficiency.

Care staff have been TUPE’d over from Barnet Council to the non-profit Fremantle Trust, but have been told to sign away a huge chunk of their pay and conditions, or face the sack. Had the work stayed public, care work across Barnet would have had consistent conditions, and the same high standards of motivation and care could have been expected. If the Fremantle staff lose their dispute, they are going to be paying for the inefficiency of the new system, directly out of their own pay packets.

Good luck to all the staff at Fremantle, and the Unison & GMB colleagues representing them. If you’d like to chuck in your 2pworth, the woman to email is Fremantle Trust Chief Exec, Carol Sawyer. carole.sawyers@fremantletrust.org