Scrap Book Project – Twenty Years of the UK National Lottery

19^th November 1994 was the day of the first UK National Lottery draw and a £1 ticket gave a one-in-14-million chance of striking lucky and guessing correctly the winning six out of 49 numbers.

I remember that everyone was talking about the National Lottery and I bought my ticket a few days in advance of the Saturday night draw.  This was in the days before ‘Lucky Dip’ so I had to choose my numbers and like a lot of people I selected meaningful dates like my birthday, my house number, my age and so on.

In 1994 I was working for Cory Environmental at Southend-on-Sea in Essex and I used to drive there everyday from Rugby, a journey which took just a little under two hours (it was a company car so I didn’t mind putting excess miles on the clock, running up a massive fuel bill or making a major contribution to global warming with my diesel emissions) and on that Saturday morning I was on weekend duty and as I drove along the M25 my head was full of plans for spending the winnings that I was absolutely confident of picking up later.  I mean, how difficult could it be to pick 6 numbers out of 49?

After a day at work the return journey was the same, would I move to France or Spain? Would I have a Ferrari or a Lamborghini? How would I tell my boss to shove his job and how far and how much would I miss my friends and family? I was totally confident of a life-changing moment in just a couple of hours or so.

Well, it wasn’t to be of course, I don’t think I even got one number, eight people shared the jackpot that night and I wasn’t one of them and I never have been of course and except for the occasional £10 win I have suffered from twenty years of LDS – Lottery Disappointment Syndrome!  I live in Grimsby, I have a Volkswagen Golf, three years ago my boss told me to shove off and made me redundant but on the upside I still have my friends and family and that includes three grandchildren who are worth several times more than any multi-million pound lottery win!

 

A Change of Career and Waste

For ten years between 3rd December 1990 and 2000 I worked in the private sector in the waste management industry and I have some rather good memories of that time.

When I say waste management to be more accurate I suppose I should say waste mismanagement because the two companies that I worked for were completely hopeless.

The first was Cory Environmental and today their website claims “We operate across the country, providing expert services in the collection, recycling and disposal of waste as well as municipal cleansing… Cory’s services have been recognised with a number of awards for sustainable transport, the management of facilities and city cleanliness”.  Well, if that is the case then things must have changed dramatically because in my time they were completely incompetent.

I found myself unexpectedly in the employment of Cory Environmental because in the 1980s and 90s local authorities were obliged to market test their services through direct competition with the private sector and this included waste management.  I worked for a Council in Nottinghamshire and we lost our work through the tendering process.  This wasn’t because we were too expensive or couldn’t put a decent business case together but rather because the people running Cory Environmental didn’t have much of a clue and submitted an under priced bid that they couldn’t possibly hope to financially or operationally achieve but was absolutely certain to win the contract.

The company had been hastily set up in the late 1980s to take advantage of this privatisation opportunity and the two men in charge were Blunders, who was the Managing Director, a man without any previous knowledge of waste management, and the Operations Director, Bodger who had once been a bus driver with Southend Borough Council and on this rather flimsy basis the companies ‘expert’ on all things transport.

They had set about winning as many contracts as possible and had been stunningly successful but this had mostly been achieved by massively under pricing the tenders and the estimator, a man called Tony Palmer, had sharpened his pencil so hard that he had to wear protective gloves so he didn’t cut his fingers.  When he won the Gedling Borough Council work in late 1989 this was added to the growing list of unprofitable contracts that was draining the Group Company bank accounts dry.

I met them for the first time when they paid a visit to Nottingham to a) gloat about their success and b) wonder just how on earth they were going to manage it.  In a conversation with a union shop steward I had condescendingly said that working for them might not be too bad and his response was to challenge me to give up my council job and guaranteed pension and do the same and I decided there an then that that was exactly what I would do!  They were in an office that had ben provided for them and I knocked on the door and waited to be invited in.

Here were two men who suffered from severe delusions of adequacy.  Blunders was a tall softly spoken man in a dull grey outfit and Bodger was a spiv in a 1930s double breasted blue pin stripe suit and Diedrie Barlow glasses that magnified the size of his pupils which was good for him because without them he had narrow squinty not to be trusted eyes.  He was a tall man and he had a physical hand shake trick to assert an authority that compensated for lack of mental ability and as I stretched out my hand he grabbed it and jerked it down almost dislocating my shoulder in the process which was almost certainly intended as a statement that said ‘I may only be a bus driver, I may be thick, I may be stupid, but I am the Operations Director!’

I said that I was interested in the job of Contract Manager, they asked me a couple of dumb questions, had a whispered conversation between themselves and offered me the job right there and then – it was as simple as that!

The poor financial performance worried Blunders and Bodger and they had two assistants who were a couple of company odd job men and general bully boys whose job it was to go around the contracts and beat up on the poor contract managers who were completely unable to meet the ridiculous financial targets that were set in their contract budgets by Peter Crane the Financial Director.

What didn’t help matters was that because it was an almost impossible job to do no one really wanted to be a contract manager (even with the Peugeot 405 company car as an incentive)  there was a lot of staff turn-over and Cory Environmental ended up with a lot of people who, quite frankly,  really just weren’t up to the job.  The only advantage of this to Head Office was that it made Blunders and Bodger look reasonably clever and kept them in a job but it didn’t help one bit with financial performance.

What also didn’t help was that, generally speaking,  local authorities (especially Labour run Councils)  didn’t really want to contract out their work, only did so reluctantly, and then made life as difficult as they possibly could.  This frequently included the unreasonable request that the company actually carry out correctly the work that they had promised to do and the council taxpayers were paying for.

This was difficult to achieve because most of the contract managers hadn’t really got any idea about waste management, man management or financial management.  Every month there were thousands of pounds of defaults for work not carried out according to the specification and then more cash penalties to follow up in retribution and this made the Company’s financial performance even worse.

Like all companies, Cory Environmental had a business plan and it has to be said that for this pair of bone heads this one made quite a lot of sense.  They planned to win work along the A1 corridor and just like the Romans, two thousand years before, use the Great North Road as the backbone of the Empire.  At first things went to plan and there were successes in Sedgefield and Wear Valley in County Durham and Wansbeck and Castle Morpeth in Northumberland, so four contracts fairly close together which made a lot of sense – not far for the enforcers to travel between contracts and knock people’s heads together when they needed it!  Like Gedling, East Northants was reasonably close to the A1 and the plan seemed to be working.  Unfortunately, faced with fierce competition,  the Company then suddenly stopped winning work in its target area and was now losing so much money that it desperately needed new contracts.

Cory Environmental had two really successful contracts at Bethnal Green (Tower Hamlets) and Bromley in London which were managed by the two best contract managers Mike Jarvis and Gary O’Hagan (contract manager of the year for three years running) but with more and more loss making contracts to cover up for the Company was hemorrhaging money and Blunders and Bodger were beginning to get nervous.  They abandoned their sensible business plan and went looking for work anywhere in the country.  Their first two successes were in Carrick and Kerrier in Cornwall, which, for those who remember their school geography lessons,  are about as far from the A1 as you can possibly get and that was their master plan in ruins.

And things were about to change!

I enjoyed my first six months with Cory Environmental, it was different, I had my first real set of working overalls and a pair of steel capped boots and used to go out on Saturdays with Martin Edwards, Vic Stanfield and Debbie Doohan and do some manual work (and drink lots of beer afterwards) just because it was good fun but soon I would be off to work elsewhere…

 

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

Lottery Disappointment Syndrome (LDS)

19^th November 1994 was the day of the first UK National Lottery draw and a £1 ticket gave a one-in-14-million chance of striking lucky and guessing correctly the winning six out of 49 numbers.

I remember that everyone was talking about the National Lottery and I bought my ticket a few days in advance of the Saturday night draw.  This was in the days before ‘Lucky Dip’ so I had to choose my numbers and like a lot of people I selected meaningful dates like my birthday, my house number, my age and so on.

In 1994 I was working for Cory Environmental at Southend-on-Sea in Essex and I used to drive there everyday from Rugby, a journey which took just a little under two hours (it was a company car so I didn’t mind putting excess miles on the clock, running up a massive fuel bill or making a major contribution to global warming with my diesel emissions) and on that Saturday morning I was on weekend duty and as I drove along the M25 that morning my head was full of plans for spending the winnings that I was confident of picking up later.  I mean, how difficult could it be to pick 6 numbers out of 49?

After a day at work the return journey was the same, would I move to France or Spain? Would I have a Ferrari or a Lamborghini? How would I tell my boss to shove his job and how much would I miss my friends and family? I was totally confident of a life-changing moment in just a couple of hours or so.

Well, it wasn’t to be of course, I don’t think I even got one number, eight people shared the jackpot that night and I wasn’t one of them and I never have been of course and except for the occasional £10 win I have suffered from sixteen years of LDS – Lottery Disappointment Syndrome!  I live in Grimsby, I have a Volkswagen Golf, my boss told me to shove off last year and made me redundant but on the upside I still have my friends and family!

 

Onyx UK, SABU, FUBAB and Swan Upping

Onyx UK no longer exists as such and has been renamed Veolia Environmental Services (sounds impressive doesn’t it?) and its website claims that it ‘currently delivers refuse collection services to around five million residents in the UK… Working with Veolia Environmental Services means Local Authorities can be assured of receiving an efficient, reliable and responsive service.’  Well, things must have changed dramatically there as well because they turned out to be just as hopeless as Cory Environmental.

The main reason for this I put down to the fact that they were a French Company who came across the English Channel without any sort of useful business plan to try to exploit the privatisation of English council services without really understanding them.  This was a shame because before this the English had effectively kept the French out for over a thousand years but now Margaret Thatcher and her Tory cronies had simply invited them in.  As well as Onyx,  Sitaclean, also from France,  came as well and it wasn’t only the French because the Spanish company Focsa also turned up, the first time Spain had had a go at England since the Armarda in 1588.  By 1995 there were simply too many players in the game, which was driving prices down and as well as the European challenge there was BFI from the USA and the home grown companies of BIFFA, Cleanaway and Service Team.

This is Onyx House on the Mile End Road in east London.

The foreign companies sent over their up and coming senior managers and all of the trainee draft-dodging clever-dicks to come and try to tell us how to be better at something we had been doing rather well for a long time before their unwanted intervention.  Our Managing Director was a man called Edouard Dupont-Madinier (Ed knows best) who was a really agreeable and pleasant man and obviously cultured and intelligent but, to me anyway, never seemed especially comfortable managing a waste management business in England.

This by the way is a typical French business management model.  If a company is in trouble, it will parachute in a graduate of one of France’s Grande Ecoles, someone who has studied business theory and economics for ten years or so but who has never set foot in depot or done a day’s work on the factory floor.

The important thing to the French is leadership not experience and for that the day-to-day running of the company was actually undertaken by a loveable rascal called Percy Powell and while he was there it was a really good place to work.  You couldn’t tell the French anything of course on account of the fact that they were exactly that – French.  There is something uniquely arrogant about them which means that even when they are so obviously stupidly wrong they are always convinced that they are right!  And, what on earth made the French think that they could keep our streets clean when they can’t even deal with the dog waste problem on the pavements in their own country?

Working for Onyx resulted in a lot of head scratching!

When I moved to Onyx I swapped my clapped out Peugeot 405 (which had been driving up and down the M1 and around the M25 for three years) for a brand new Citroen Xantia and was based at Maidenhead and for a while just concentrated on making my new contract a success.  I found myself in unusual circumstances because this contract actually made a profit so there was no longer the day-to-day pressure of trying to improve the finances and explaining reoccurring monthly failure to the bosses.

The money was rolling in and the French really liked my contract because it was Royal and special and the Queen lived at Windsor so they kept bringing dignitaries and potential clients to visit and they always wanted to show off so we used to go to lunch at the Roux Brothers Michelin Star Restaurant on Monkey Island at Bray which must have cost a fortune in hospitality.  My friend and manager Mike Jarvis used to visit regularly and we would do a bit of work  in the morning and then have a nice lunch together at the White Hart in the nearby village of Holyport.  In the evenings we used to go to the Old Swan Uppers pub in  Cookham and after a meal and a few drinks stay overnight at the Company’s expense.  I was rarely under any pressure and life was good.

I didn’t complain of course but the French were equally as unfathomable as Cory Environmental when it came to spending unnecessary money.  Just as with Cory we stayed in expensive hotels and hung out in bars and nice restaurants but what was even better about Onyx was that once a year we all assembled at Waterloo station and they put us on Eurostar train and took us through the tunnel to Paris for an annual conference which was much, much better than Torbay and the IWM conference (even though we still went there as well).  One year when they were really showing off after buying out a competitor they took us to the Moulin Rouge for a special treat and we had champagne to drink and watch a variety show.  And they called this work!

With all of this extravagance you would have thought that the company was making a fortune and all of the contracts were highly profitable but not a bit of this was true and just as Cory Environmental the thing they really excelled at was getting tenders wrong, under pricing to win the work and then losing money in dramatic style.  Councils up and down the country from Berwick-on-Tweed in Northumberland to Teignbridge in Devon were all taking advantage of cut-price services and the French were subsidising council tax payers all over England by hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Another surprising thing was that although financial performance was woeful every April we all used to get a generous annual bonus of two or three thousand pounds each.  This was very nice but ridiculous because the company was going down the financial plughole fast.  I have to confess now that I contributed to that because I was part of the tendering team that successfully bid for the Wycombe contract and have to accept my full share of the blame.  Angela Sives, was the tendering manager, who, in a delicious twist of fate, later went on to work for Wycombe District Council as the Procurement Manager because presumably they thought she could do a great deal like that every time?

This one was a real shocker and although not quite on the Cory Environmental Southend scale, lost significant amounts of money from day one.

Thinking about this reminded me of the Onyx management method of assessing mistakes.  Basically there were two, a SABU and a FUBAB.  A SABU is a ‘Self Adjusting Balls Up‘ and not particularly critical, the sort of mistake that will put itself right with a bit of adjustment and covering up but a FUBAB, ‘A F*** Up Beyond All Belief’ is much more serious, impossible to cover up, requires lots of work to straighten it out and can be a potential career wrecker.  Well, believe me the Wycombe tender was a monumental FUBAB and one that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and was never put right.

In my opinion, the explanation why tenders were so consistently underbid was down to two reasons.  First the tendering team always assumed that the operational teams would be able to deliver everything according to plan and always in the most efficient way and sadly this was rarely the case.  Secondly because each tender went through a review process and at each stage as it travelled up through the company hierarchy someone would take something out here or reduce  resources there or make unrealistic assumptions about the whole bid and by the time they were signed off they were always another potential financial liability.

Imagine my surprise that despite my contribution to the Wycombe fiasco I was rewarded with an annual bonus just the same and shortly after that a promotion to Regional Manager of the North.  This was a huge region stretching from Berwick on Tweed on the Scottish border to Derby in the Midlands and from Boston, in Lincolnshire, on the east coast, to Copeland in Cumbria on the west.  In all there were thirteen contracts in the region and except for Trafford in Manchester they all made a loss.  The downside was that the regional office was in Derby and I had to live at home for a few months.

Luckily, being such a large region naturally involved huge amounts of travelling and being away from home meant more time in hotels and more hefty bar bills.  Eventually the company rented me a nice house in Richmond in Yorkshire and I had a very enjoyable year living in the Yorkshire Moors at their expense.  It was like being on a permanent holiday and disappointing therefore when Colin Whitehead, the previous Regional Manager (who had left and gone to work for Service Team, a competitor) decided he didn’t like it there after all and wanted to come back.

Being a mate of Percy he was reappointed and given his old region back and I was sent back to Windsor and Maidenhead with the compensation of a new Central Region, which unfortunately included the financial millstone of Wycombe.  And not just Wycombe because I also inherited a lot of unprofitable contracts from a man called Peter Clint who had cleaned out all the reserves and all the bargaining opportunities on the way out.  Peter was a bit of a crook, a chancer and a rogue and he stitched me up good and proper and later on was to gang up on me with others to lose me my job.

The real shocker however was that Windsor and Maidenhead was also beginning to lose money through the loss of profitable bits of the contract and the addition of new work that didn’t make any money at all, there was  a new council client manager who rather unreasonably expected us to do all of the work in the contract specification and Mike was too busy in another failing contract at Westminster to drop by and visit.

This is the Swan Uppers in Cookham.  Swan Uppers is a strange name don’t you think?  Well, here is the explanation:

Swan upping is a means of establishing a swan census, and today also serves to check the health of swans. Under a Royal Charter of the fifteenth century, the Vintners’ Company and the Dyers’ Company, two Livery Companies of the City of London, are entitled to share in the Sovereign’s ownership. They conduct the census through a process of ringing the swan’s feet, but the swans are no longer eaten.

Swan upping occurs annually during the third week of July. During the ceremony, the Queen’s, the Vintners’, and the Dyers’ Swan Uppers row up the river in skiffs and literally ‘lift’ the birds – hence ‘upping). Swans caught by the Queen’s Swan Uppers under the direction of the Swan Marker are unmarked, except for a ring linked to the database of the British Trust For Ornithology.

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More Waste Management Tales:

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

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Hospitality Budgets

I have written here before about my ten year career in waste management (1990-2000) with Cory Environmental and Onyx UK but I don’t think I really mentioned the Chartered Institute of Waste Management Annual Conference that used to be held every June in Paignton in Devon.

The Institute of Waste Management is a sort of professional trade union.  When it started almost anyone could join but over the years it has become an exclusive club that you have to pass pointless exams to get in. Let me put this into some kind of perspective – this is not about being an architect, a journalist a solicitor or a teacher, waste management is about picking up other people’s rubbish and chucking it into the back of a smelly dustcart!

In June 1991 the company (Cory Environmental) made arrangements for all the managers to attend the conference and exhibition and we stayed at the Maycliffe Hotel in St Luke’s Road in Torquay.  I had already started to become accustomed to uncontrolled drinking bouts at the expense of the company whilst staying in hotels but the annual IWM conference was the equivalent of the FA Cup Final or the Eurovision Song Contest because at this event everyone went crazy.

We were there for three nights and as well as the ludicrous extravagance of the company with people simply drinking themselves stupid there was unlimited hospitality because all of the big supply companies were there and wanted to impress and sell and were prepared to pay for it.  The big event and the one everyone lusted to get a ticket for was the Dennis Eagle banquet because this promised good food and high class entertainment but there was also plenty of food and drink from their competitors Jack Allen and the street sweeping vehicle manufacturers Johnson and Scarab.  As well as the big events there were lots of fringe companies trying to impress, wheelie bins, plastic sacks, protective clothing and tyres and they all hospitality budgets that we were eager to help them spend.

I went to the exhibition five times with Cory and then continued to go after I had left and moved to Onyx UK.  When we weren’t hanging around suppliers looking for free hand outs we would spend lunchtimes at the Inn on the Green and consume more beer and charge it to our company expense accounts.

I didn’t complain of course because Cory and Onyx were equally unfathomable when it came to spending unnecessary money.  We stayed in expensive hotels and hung out in bars and nice restaurants but what was better about Onyx was that once a year we all assembled at Waterloo station and they put us on Eurostar train and took us through the tunnel to Paris for an annual conference.  One year when they were really showing off after buying out a competitor they took us to the Moulin Rouge for a special treat and we had champagne to drink and watch an entertaining stage show.  And they called this work!

Even with poor financial performance the Company kept spending unnecessary money and one day in February 1997 my boss Percy telephoned me to tell me that he had heard of a new type of refuse collection vehicle with impressive labour saving innovations that offered huge operational savings and that he was interested in finding out more.  He asked me if I would be prepared to visit the factory where they were manufactured and give him my opinion.  To be honest I had very little interest in bincarts or how they are made but fortunately, before I could decline, he happened to mention that the factory was in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States of America and as quick as a flash my lack of interest transformed into complete and total enthusiasm.  Did I want to visit Phoenix to see some dustcarts?  You bet I did!

I couldn’t believe my luck and enjoyed four days in the United States where as well as having to visit the Heil refuse collection truck factory, which quite frankly was a bit of a bore, I also got to visit the Grand Canyon and enjoy some top class hospitality.  This was a really good trip and on reflection I decided that refuse vehicle manufacture was actually rather interesting after all.  We posted the report of our visit (missing out the drinking bits of course) and offered our availability for any similar official trips in the future.  This was a good move because the following year I was sent to La Rochelle in France to look at Semat refuse trucks and later in the same year I went to Milan to see the Brivio factory.  It’s amazing how interesting refuse trucks can suddenly become when there is an all expenses overseas trip involved.

Later the Company set up a centralised procurement unit under a greedy little man called Rob Stubbs that saved the best gigs for themselves and that was the end of the factory visits and the overseas travel but believe me I enjoyed it while it lasted.

I continued to go to the IWM conference and exhibition even after I left Onyx UK but to be honest without the heavy drinking at someone else’s expense and the hospitality which wasn’t really extended to local authority delegates it all began to lose its appeal and the very last time I went was 10^th June 2003.

I don’t think the IWM has a conference and exhibition any more but they were extremely good fun while they lasted.

Cory Environmental and Hotel Bar Bills

Cory Environmental started out in 1896 as William Cory and Son Ltd, transporting coal into London on the River Thames.  Coal was the lifeblood of the city and they made a fortune and in the 1920s they diversified and began to transport waste using the City’s waterways.

In the 1980s however the union riddled coal and oil distribution services were sold, and the business decided to expand into and concentrate upon waste management .  In 1990 the company was renamed Cory Environmental and it appointed Blunders and Bodger to run the municipal division.

In the first year they made a huge number of mistakes but then these two pygmies of the business world went a step further than ever before and were jointly responsible for the biggest catastrophe of all when they bid for and won the Southend-on-Sea contract in Essex.  They had been so determined to win this contract because they had both worked for the previous contractor, BIFFA, who had let them both go (if you know what I mean?) and they wanted to get their spiteful own back!  And they did so in spectacular style and within weeks of starting operations the contract was losing money at the running rate of over one million pounds a year.  Bodger was exposed as completely inept, he actually had no idea about vehicles at all and he couldn’t organise refuse collection or street cleaning routes to save his life and Blunders pressed the panic button.

He called for Mike Jarvis who had an impressive track record of success and, because, to begin with, we had been doing quite well at the Gedling contract (mostly down to good luck it has to be said) I was drafted in to assist him.  It was a complete shambles.   No matter how good they might have been no one, not even Mike, could possibly correct the mistakes that these two clowns had made and in spite of everything that was done there was no magic solution and the contract kept losing thousands of pounds and eventually David Riddle, the Group Chief Executive, had had more than enough and invited Blunders to reconsider his career path.

They both should have gone of course but no one would ever describe Bodger as loyal or reliable and he knifed poor old Blunders in the back (several times I seem to remember) to save himself.  After being bitten by an adder at the depot Mike went back to Bethnal Green and I got a substantial pay rise and stayed on as contract manager at Southend and Cory Environmental paid for me to live in the Camelia Hotel on Eastern Esplanade in Thorpe Bay for the rest of the Summer.

Camelia Hotel, Thorpe Bay, Southend on Sea

The Company now needed a replacement Managing Director (someone who knew about running a waste management company would have been useful) but we got a man called Jeremy Smith who was considered suitable on the dubious basis that he had been running one of the Company’s shipping divisions somewhere in Colonial Africa.  It turned out that Cory needed somewhere to put a loyal long serving senior manager and to be fair Jeremy was a great bloke but he was an expert in ships and cargo and docks and just wasn’t suited to collecting council rubbish.  To make his job even more difficult he didn’t have the support of Bodger who sharpened his knife and did his best to undermine him at every opportunity.

Just like Blunders, Jeremy needed more business, preferably something profitable, and he won his first contract in Woodspring in Somerset.  As usual there was great initial optimism about what was expected to be a spectacularly profitable contract especially after the brilliant appointment to contract manager of an ex Ginsters door-to-door pie salesman on the basis that he was familiar with the area!  Unhappily the honeymoon period didn’t last very long, neither did the pie man and soon it was the familiar old story of wretched financial performance and more losses to add to the company woes.

I was glad that they had won Woodspring because by now the Company had accepted that I had done just about all that I could do at Southend by getting the contract to break-even (only for one month it has to be said, and with a great deal of ‘creative accounting’) and I found myself called upon more and more often to join the ‘putting things right’ team and there was a great deal of work for them that was for sure.

In 1992 I spent a very pleasant summer at the Royal Pier Hotel in Weston-super-Mare alongside Mike Jarvis and Paul Ammonds (who was obliged to be on the team to try and put right what he had put wrong in the first place), Gary O’Hagan (Contract manager for three years running) and just about anyone else who happened to be available for additional weekend seaside duties.

Hotel Royal Pier, Weston-Super-Mare

On the whole we didn’t mind this because to compensate us the Company used to put us up in smart hotels and there was always an open bar which resulted in some very large bills I can tell you.  This was how daft the Company was because despite the fact that the financial position was completely dire they never clamped down on excessive bar and restaurant bills and we just added to the problem that we were there to try and solve.  For example, every year in June we all turned up to the Institute of Waste Annual Conference in Torbay, booked into nice hotels and got stuck into the bars and no one ever had the brains to stop it.  One weekend I took the whole family to Weston-super-Mare for a long weekend just because there was a bit of work to do on the Saturday morning.  We never sorted Woodspring out and the accounts were still leaking like a sieve several months later but even though we were spectacularly unsuccessful we still kept getting the emergency calls to other locations which meant more hotels, more bars and more restaurants.

Sadly, the Royal Pier Hotel burnt down in a suspicious accident on 5^th June 2009 while it was waiting redevelopment.

One summer Bernard at Carrick lost the beach cleaning tractor in the sea and I was sent to Truro to help him out.  I liked Truro and found more and more reasons to return to the city and stay in the best hotel in town, the Royal on Lemon Street, as many times as I could.  I especially liked to go there during the summer, walk around the town and drive around the Lizard and all the holiday villages visiting the beaches.

Royal Hotel, Truro, now renamed Mannings Royal.

The Privatisation of Public Services

On 11^th February 1975 the Conservative Party choose Margaret Thatcher as their new leader and when she eventually became the first woman Prime Minister the country was engulfed in a wave of right wing extremism that as usual picked on local government for a real good kicking.

In the 1980s and 1990s because Margaret Thatcher thought that the private sector was, by definition, much more competent and efficient in these matters than the public sector and local authorities were required to offer certain services for open competition under what was called ‘Compulsory Competitive Tendering’.  If only she had known the truth – ‘Compusory Competitive Thieving’ would have been a more appropriate project title!

Rubbish collection was one of these services and so that the waste management companies could cope with all the new work and local authorities couldn’t cheat, the Government set out a phased three year programme and one by one local authority services were thrown into a private sector pond full of hungry piranha ready to strip the flesh off of public services, cynically reduce service standards and hopefully get fat at the council tax payer’s expense. As soon as the waste management companies spotted a contract they took a liking to they would express an interest, obtain the tender documents and specifications and go to work sharpening their pencils.

This was never a scientific process and the first thing the tendering manager did was to get up early one Monday morning and sit outside the council depot and count the dustcarts and the number of men in them as they left to go to work.  And that was about all there was to it and half an hour later over a bacon butty and a cup of tea he would write this down on the back of a fag packet and by mid morning he would have a price in his head.  Nothing else in his head, just the price!  Sometimes, if he was being especially thorough, he would go back on Tuesday morning just to check his calculations but this would be quite unusual.

The tendering manager at Cory Environmental was a man called Tony Palmer and for Tony arriving at the tender price was gloriously simple.  If the Council had ten refuse collection rounds, the company would do it with nine, and just in case the Council could do it for nine then they would do it with eight so that would immediately undercut the Council price by 20%.  Just to make absolutely certain they would find out how much a refuse collector was paid each week and then they would reduce that by 20% as well.  If the Council had three mechanics to keep the fleet running they would do it with two and so on and so on. There was no way these boys could fail to win tenders!

I worked for the private sector waste management companies for ten years between 1990 and 2000 and then thankfully was able to return to local government where services are provided properly through direct delivery so imagine my horror when ‘son of Thatcher’ David Cameron became Conservative Prime Minister in 2010 and has embarked on a similar dismantling of public services and twenty years after my first painful experience in the incompetent world of the private sector I find myself facing the same prospect all over again.

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

“Her legacy is public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed that together shackle the human spirit”                                                                            Guardian Newspaper on Margaret Thatcher

In the couple of weeks in between accepting the job as Contract Manager at Gedling in November 1989 and the contract actually starting there was a lot to do organising the work.  Martin Edwards, the contract Supervisor and Vic Stanfield, the foreman, had already done a lot of this work, reorganising the collection rounds and putting the three man crews together to take into account the reduction in vehicles and manpower that came as an inevitable consequence of being privatised.

We didn’t realise this at the time but as it turned out this was most unusual because normal practice was for the new management team to wait until the very last moment to begin to think about important things like actually getting the work done while they concentrated on totally peripheral matters.

We finished with Gedling Borough Council on Friday 30^th November which gave the team a few days to put the finishing touches in place before the contract started a week later.  In this time the office inside the vehicle workshop was constructed and furnished with brand new office desks and filing cabinets, shiny Sasco wall charts and a microwave oven.  One whole day was wasted when we all drove down to Southend-on-Sea to collect our new Peugeot company cars and then went to Charlton in East London to meet the Head Office team.

The Managing Director and the Operations Director, Blunders and Blodger, came to the depot the weekend before the first Monday morning and contributed nothing more useful than cleaning out the vehicle cabs and putting the company logo on the side of the trucks.

They also brought the operations assistant Jane Brennan with them and she very helpfully went shopping for an office waste bin and a washing up bowl.  This was considered to be a very important job because it was essential to make sure every depot had the same office furniture in the correct corporate colours of blue and green and this was a job that was considered to be far too demanding for us.  It didn’t occur to them to bring along any clever work schedules because anything as complicated as that which required cerebral activity was completely beyond them both.

The weather was awful and snow and ice began to pile up outside in the depot yard and each vehicle was covered in several inches as it stood outside the workshop garages growing icicles and waiting in turn for a superficial makeover.  The weather was so bad that there was a power cut at my home in Derbyshire which lasted all weekend so I was actually rather glad to be at work in the warm workshops and offices but by Sunday teatime the novelty was wearing off and I was tired of vacuuming vehicle cabs and scraping off Gedling Borough Council stickers, my hands and feet were cold and I was beginning to wonder what I had let myself in for.  Blunders and Bodger just squabbled with each other all the time about the correct placement of the Cory Environmental logos on the sides of the dustcarts and the weekend just slipped away without anything really useful being done.

At some point on the Sunday the two company bully boys, Mike Mara and Jim Pitt turned up and I stupidly thought they would have something useful to offer but of course they didn’t and they just hung around the new office drinking tea and coffee and making the place look untidy.

Martin and I were really fed up by now but our spirits were lifted when at about six o’clock Bodger said that it might be a good idea if the two of us left off from vehicle scrubbing duties and went to the office to prepare for tomorrow morning and the first day of the contract.  These two chumps actually seemed to believe that we had spent the last four weeks doing nothing and that we should now take an hour or so to organise the collection rounds.  We didn’t say anything of course but we had got everything perfectly organised, Martin was very good at designing work schedules and we were delighted to sit in the warm first floor offices with a hot cup of tea and look down into the workshop at these four charlies all working away in the cold until almost ten o’clock at night – Wankers!

The next morning we turned up for work at six o’clock to see Malk Rockley and the street cleaners out first and then an hour later the refuse collection crews.  Blunders and Bodger were there and Mike and Jim who were normally on these occasions required to go out and deal with any catastrophes were too but we had everything well organised and under control so by nine o’clock they belatedly declared themselves surplus to requirement and all went off in different directions up and down the A1 to drop in on another contract and make life uncomfortable for the managers with a bit of a kicking about poor financial and operational performance.  When we were certain that they were at a safe distance we sent out for some bacon rolls and we put our feet up waiting for the crews to finish their days work.

Unfortunately the weather just continued to deteriorate and get colder and colder.  Readers unfamiliar with Gedling Borough Council in Nottinghamshire are forgiven for not knowing the topography of the area but basically the district is split in two by a high ridge called Mapperley Top and because it was exceptionally cold at the top of the hill any dustcart attempting to cross it to get to the town of Carlton on the other side just had its bin collection mechanism freeze up and had to return to the depot to be defrosted.

Prospects looked bleak but then I had a brilliant idea – keep all the crews on the Arnold side of the ridge and collect all the refuse there in the morning and then after (if) it had warmed up send them all to Carlton in the afternoon.  Either by my sheer managerial brilliance or by an absolute meteorological fluke the plan worked perfectly, we collected all the refuse as planned (which was an unheard of success in the private sector waste management business), we were in the pub with a pint of beer by six o’clock and I was beginning to believe that this waste management business wasn’t nearly as difficult as I had imagined it might be.

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

A Life in a Year – 3rd December, A Change of Career

For ten years between 3rd December 1990 and 2000 I worked in the private sector in the waste management industry and I have some rather good memories of that time. 

When I say waste management to be more accurate I suppose I should say waste mismanagement because the two companies that I worked for were completely hopeless. 

The first was Cory Environmental and today their website claims “We operate across the country, providing expert services in the collection, recycling and disposal of waste as well as municipal cleansing… Cory’s services have been recognised with a number of awards for sustainable transport, the management of facilities and city cleanliness”.  Well, if that is the case then things must have changed dramatically because in my time they were completely incompetent.

I found myself unexpectedly in the employment of Cory Environmental because in the 1980s and 90s local authorities were obliged to market test their services through direct competition with the private sector and this included waste management.  I worked for a Council in Nottinghamshire and we lost our work through the tendering process.  This wasn’t because we were too expensive or couldn’t put a decent business case together but rather because the people running Cory Environmental didn’t have much of a clue and submitted an under priced bid that they couldn’t possibly hope to financially or operationally achieve but was absolutely certain to win the contract.

The company had been hastily set up in the late 1980s to take advantage of this privatisation opportunity and the two men in charge were Blunders, who was the Managing Director, a man without any previous knowledge of waste management, and the Operations Director, Bodger who had once been a bus driver with Southend Borough Council and on this rather flimsy basis the companies ‘expert’ on all things transport.

They had set about winning as many contracts as possible and had been stunningly successful but this had mostly been achieved by massively under pricing the tenders and the estimator, a man called Tony Palmer, had sharpened his pencil so hard that he had to wear protective gloves so he didn’t cut his fingers.  When he won the Gedling Borough Council work in late 1989 this was added to the growing list of unprofitable contracts that was draining the Group Company bank accounts dry.

I met them for the first time when they paid a visit to Nottingham to a) gloat about their success and b) wonder just how on earth they were going to manage it.  In a conversation with a union shop steward I had condescendingly said that working for them might not be too bad and his response was to challenge me to give up my council job and guaranteed pension and do the same and I decided there an then that that was exactly what I would do!  They were in an office that had ben provided for them and I knocked on the door and waited to be invited in.

Blunders was a tall softly spoken man in a dull grey suit and Bodger was a spiv in a 1930s double breasted blue pin stripe suit and Diedrie Barlow glasses that magnified the size of his pupils which was good for him because without them he had narrow squinty not to be trusted eyes.  I said that I was interested in the job of Contract Manager, they asked me a couple of dumb questions, had a whispered conversation between themselves and offered me the job right there – it was as simple as that!

The poor financial performance worried Blunders and Bodger and they had two assistants who were a couple of company odd job men and general bully boys whose job it was to go around the contracts and beat up on the poor contract managers who were completely unable to meet the ridiculous financial targets that were set in their contract budgets by Peter Crane the Financial Director.

What didn’t help matters was that because it was an almost impossible job to do no one really wanted to be a contract manager (even with the Peugeot 405 company car as an incentive)  there was a lot of staff turn-over and Cory Environmental ended up with a lot of people who, quite frankly,  really just weren’t up to the job.  The only advantage of this to Head Office was that it made Blunders and Bodger look reasonably clever and kept them in a job but it didn’t help one bit with financial performance.

What also didn’t help was that, generally speaking,  local authorities (especially Labour run Councils)  didn’t really want to contract out their work, only did so reluctantly, and then made life as difficult as they possibly could.  This frequently included the unreasonable request that the company actually carry out correctly the work that they had promised to do and the council taxpayers were paying for.  This was difficult to achieve because most of the contract managers hadn’t really got any idea about waste management, man management or financial management.  Every month there were thousands of pounds of defaults for work not carried out according to the specification and then more cash penalties to follow up in retribution and this made the Company’s financial performance even worse.

Like all companies, Cory Environmental had a business plan and it has to be said that for this pair of bone heads this one made quite a lot of sense.  They planned to win work along the A1 corridor and just like the Romans, two thousand years before, use the Great North Road as the backbone of the Empire.  At first things went to plan and there were successes in Sedgefield and Wear Valley in County Durham and Wansbeck and Castle Morpeth in Northumberland, so four contracts fairly close together which made a lot of sense – not far for the enforcers to travel between contracts and knock people’s heads together when they needed it!  Like Gedling, East Northants was reasonably close to the A1 and the plan seemed to be working.  Unfortunately, faced with fierce competition,  the Company then suddenly stopped winning work in its target area and was now losing so much money that it desperately needed new contracts.

Cory Environmental had two really successful contracts at Bethnal Green (Tower Hamlets) and Bromley in London which were managed by the two best contract managers Mike Jarvis and Gary O’Hagan (contract manager of the year for three years running) but with more and more loss making contracts to cover up for the Company was hemorrhaging money and Blunders and Bodger were beginning to get nervous.  They abandoned their sensible business plan and went looking for work anywhere in the country.  Their first two successes were in Carrick and Kerrier in Cornwall, which, for those who remember their school geography lessons,  are about as far from the A1 as you can possibly get and that was their master plan in ruins.

And things were about to change! 

I enjoyed my first six months with Cory Environmental, it was different, I had my first real set of working overalls and a pair of steel capped boots and used to go out on Saturdays with Martin Edwards, Vic Stanfield and Debbie Doohan and do some manual work (and drink lots of beer afterwards) just because it was good fun but soon I would be off to work elsewhere…

 Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

Disorganising the Work

The Tendering process

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

A Year in a Life – 19th November, Lottery Disappointment Syndrome (LDS)

19^th November 1994 was the day of the first UK National Lottery draw and a £1 ticket gave a one-in-14-million chance of striking lucky and guessing correctly the winning six out of 49 numbers.

I remember that everyone was talking about the National Lottery and I bought my ticket a few days in advance of the Saturday night draw.  This was in the days before ‘Lucky Dip’ so I had to choose my numbers and like a lot of people I selected meaningful dates like my birthday, my house number, my age and so on.

In 1994 I was working for Cory Environmental at Southend-on-Sea in Essex and I used to drive there everyday from Rugby, a journey which took just a little under two hours (it was a company car so I didn’t mind putting excess miles on the clock, running up a massive fuel bill or making a major contribution to global warming with my diesel emissions) and on that Saturday morning I was on weekend duty and as I drove along the M25 that morning my head was full of plans for spending the winnings that I was confident of picking up later.  I mean, how difficult could it be to pick 6 numbers out of 49?

After a day at work the return journey was the same, would I move to France or Spain? Would I have a Ferrari or a Lamborghini? How would I tell my boss to shove his job and how much would I miss my friends and family? I was totally confident of a life-changing moment in just a couple of hours or so.

Well, it wasn’t to be of course, I don’t think I even got one number, eight people shared the jackpot that night and I wasn’t one of them and I never have been of course and except for the occasional £10 win I have suffered from sixteen years of LDS – Lottery Disappointment Syndrome!  I live in Grimsby, I have a Volkswagen Golf, my boss told me to shove off earlier this year and made me redundant but on the upside I still have my friends and family!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxSVRS4tTRo