Public good, private bad

Says the BBC, or at least that is what you would think listening to their take on the news.

First of all we have the news that the Chief Executive of Southern Cross will be leaving the company and waiving the £450,000 pay off to which he is entitled.  He is constantly harrangued by the interviewer despite saying that 90% of the SC care homes have replacement operators in place.  What about the other 10%?  Well frankly it takes time to negotiate agreements and nobody says that there aren't operators lined up; it justs takes time.  This is not enough to stop the interviewer asking whether the SC business strategy was "reckless" or "immoral".

But then we have the story that 25 staff will be leaving the National Audit Office with a total payoff of £5.2 million or on average £200,000.  One of the government department's soon to be ex-employees will be trousering £750,000, for reasons that are not entirely obvious. Not much of a peep from the BBC; no tracking down any of the 25 staff for aggressive questioning, and yet unlike the private sector Chief Exec, these public sector workers are all taking the money.

Next we hear from Lord Crisp, the NHS chief executive from 2000 to 2006 who says that more hospitals need to close if the NHS is going to cope in the future. Closing hospitals would free up funds for community services to deal with the ageing population. He added that while he was the Chief Executive of the NHS the scale of hospital building projects went too far. More than 100 new hospitals or rebuilds were given the go-ahead.

So did the interviewer ask wwhether his business strategy was "reckless" or "immoral"?  Of course not, and I am sure there fawning creep never thought to question Lord Crisp's entitlement to a full fat NHS pension even though he "retired" from his position at the age of only 54.

The likely BBC explanation would be that the NHS is a national provider of public social and healthcare services, whereas Southern Cross is a national provider of social and nursing services, err, I mean lying thieving private sector scum.