Carillion dig their own grave

Carillion? Oh. Bugger...

It’s shocking to hear that Carillion have gone into liquidation, and frightening to hear that their pension fund is in the red to the tune of nearly £600m.

I really liked their 1985 hit “Kayleigh”. Perhaps they wouldn’t be in this situation if they hadn’t agreed to such large retirement payments for former lead singer Fish and...

Marillion? Oh, right – I see what happened there. The band build monolithic brooding rock songs, and the construction giant has it’s fingers in a worryingly large number of pies, but forgot to keep an eye on the piggy bank.

With 20,000 staff in the UK alone, and over twice that worldwide, their financial meltdown is a huge concern for their many employees. It’s a big worry for the rest of us too, as it looks like we’ll be “doing a banks” again, and bailing them out of the £1.5bn hole they’ve dug themselves into.

As their portfolio includes contracts for services such as hospital and prison maintenance, and cleaning and dinners in schools, the government have stepped in to ensure employees are paid.

With 450 government contracts, including a £1.4bn joint venture for the HS2 rail project, and maintaining the homes of 50,000 military personnel, the gigantic organisation will now have it’s future decided by a court-appointed official receiver. Don’t expect it to get resolved quickly – it will take a large team of experts months to figure this one out. Much like me trying to use most car park ticket machines.

At least I only inconvenience a couple of people behind me in the queue (and generally lose 50p) when I get it wrong. Carillion have thousands of current and former staff who need pension payments, which may now need covering by the Pension Protection Fund. Some of their public service contracts may need to be taken in-house by the government, along with the necessary employees.

Other companies working in a consortium with the failed giant may take on their staff too, but what about the worried companies in the supply chain who are owed money? What about the loss-making public contracts; will the government have to nationalise them to get the job done?

Which leads us to the inevitable, depressing, conclusion - we’ll all be paying for this building firm’s falling-down. As if that very bitter bill wasn’t hard enough to swallow, we’ll get to wash it down with the fact that eight contracts were awarded to the company after profit warnings had been issued. By the government. Yes – they chucked (your) money into a failing venture, and will now want some more to fix the whole mess and keep important services running, and essential projects underway.

Cabinet ministers had a Cobra crisis meeting on Monday about keeping vital public services going. Meanwhile, the House of Commons Public Administration Committee launched an enquiry into government outsourcing.

On the up-side, we’ve got something else to grumble about now other than Brexit and the weather. Marillion’s “Kayleigh” contains the line “Is it too late to say I’m sorry?” For Carillion, it definitely is.

This post first appeared as the lead piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 19th of January 2018. It was re-titled as "A very bitter pill to swallow" in print and on The Mail's website. It doesn't look like the News & Star's website carries any opinion stuff, and I haven't seen a copy of the print edition yet - I'm presuming it's the same layout.

I'll be honest here - I tweeted the Marillion/Carillion joke a few days before writing this, and was so damn pleased with myself I turned it into a full-length piece for my lead piece in my first outing as a full-page columnist.

I'll post the other two pieces (a cunning plan to get people to buy-into re-usable coffee cups and the suggestion that Sarah Millican can perform magic with her tea) separately. Stay tuned!)

(CD A-Z: Listening to a Christmas present today. The Art of Noises's "In Visible Silence" - Deluxe Edition. Twang!)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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