[Fozzy]

So the MoJ didn't notice that they'd paid out £23 million for nothing? They could have kept legal aid for that, and had money to spare.

[new puritan]

Some sort of disturbance at G4S-run Oakwood prison last night. Hard to find much in the way of detail though.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... -jail.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Fflaps]

The BBC has a little more information including an inmate saying it was nearly a riot. Not much more than the Telegraph though.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25618613" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[new puritan]

Good thing ministerial responsibility doesn't exist anymore, otherwise Grayling would have been out of a job by now.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Good thing ministerial responsibility doesn't exist anymore, otherwise Grayling would have been out of a job by now.

Not by the standards of Michael Howard, he wouldn't.

He managed to lose 6 Cat A prisoners from Whitemoor.

[davidjay]

The Express & Star (Motto: Anything the Mail can do...)'s take on it.

http://www.expressandstar.com/news/2014 ... d-trouble/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Big Arnold]

G4S and Serco face £4million penalty over 'substandard' accommodation for asylum seekers

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho ... 51174.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Fozzy]

Not G4S this time but another private company, CEO:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-25749685" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

An 84-year-old immigration detainee suffering from dementia, who was declared unfit for detention, died in handcuffs, a report has discovered.

HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) compiled the report after visiting Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, near Heathrow airport.

Inspectors condemned "shocking cases where a sense of humanity was lost" at the centre in west London.

The Chief Inspector of Prisons said some services were "poorly managed".

The Prison Reform Trust said the centre had "forgotten the basic principles of humanity and decency".

Other examples in the report included a stroke victim in a wheelchair, who was handcuffed on a journey to hospital for no obvious reason and a dying man who remained handcuffed while sedated and undergoing an angioplasty procedure in hospital.

Could be interesting to see the Mail's take on it. Normally they wouldn't care, but CEO was careless enough to do this to a Canadian.

[new puritan]

This story just gets worse.

A man in his 80s who died in handcuffs at Britain’s biggest detention centre was travelling via London on a quest to track down his long-lost daughter, it emerged today.

Alois Dvorzac, 84, had left his home in Canada on a last journey to say goodbye to the daughter he had left in Slovenia decades before.

But the mission ended in tragedy when Mr Dvorzac was refused entry to the UK at Gatwick and taken to Harmondsworth immigration removal centre near Heathrow to be deported.

He was declared unfit for detention or deportation a week later after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but was held for a further two weeks before being transferred to hospital where he died in February last year, having been shackled for five hours,

Only after his heart had stopped and cardiopulmonary resuscitation started were the restraints removed.

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/man-8 ... 66055.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Esqui]

Manus Island violence: Fatal violence occurred after G4S guards went in, PNG report finds

The violent clashes on Manus Island that left an Iranian asylum seeker dead happened after local G4S descended on protesting asylum-seekers, a preliminary police briefing has indicated.

The spokesman said the findings were preliminary but indicated that local G4S guards had carried out the violent suppression of the protest

G4S then released a statement, before deleting all traces of it from their website.

[new puritan]

(Reuters) - British security group G4S will again be considered for government contracts after ministers said on Wednesday they were satisfied with the firm's efforts to overhaul itself following a series of damaging failures.

Last month G4S, the world's biggest security group, agreed to repay 108.9 million pounds to the government after overcharging it on a contract to tag criminals. That mistake followed its failure to provide enough guards for the London Olympics in 2012.

The failures forced the company to overhaul its management. It has made 28 senior appointments and has embarked on a restructuring and investment scheme to revive its fortunes and win the trust of UK government, a customer worth almost 10 percent of its 7.4 billion pound annual revenues.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/04/0 ... 6A20140409" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Once you're on that gravy train, there's no getting you off.

[Andy McDandy]

Too big to fail, I think is the expression.

[new puritan]

Good piece from Ian Dunt.

In March 2012, the Home Office decided it wanted to shave off £140 million from the price of housing the 23,000 destitute asylum seekers waiting to be cleared. It did this by taking the 22 contracts from 13 different suppliers, scrapping them, and instead handing just six contracts to three suppliers - G4S, Serco and Clearel - only the latter of which has any experience in this area.

This is against government policy, which is supposed to be encouraging small-and-medium-sized companies to supply government services. Instead, the Home Office handed more work to a firm which was at that exact moment spectacularly failing to satisfy its contractual obligations for the London Olympics.

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2014/04 ... -mishandle" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[new puritan]

Not G4S, but we don't have a Serco thread and I'm not sure it's worth starting one so I'll leave this here.

Serco, the troubled outsourcing giant being probed by the Serious Fraud Office, is set to plunge into the red and is believed to be poised to ask investors for hundreds of millions of pounds.

Investment bank Numis believes profits have nosedived from £106million in the first half of 2013 to a loss of £11million over the same period this year.

The City expects Serco will need to raise up to £375million from shareholders in a rights issue, though this is likely to come next year after a strategic review of the company has been completed.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mark ... tions.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Sure the Tories can dig out another multi-billion pound contract from somewhere to see them right.

[Samanfur]

Nick Gargan: Former chief of Avon and Somerset police hired by G4S weeks after being found guilty of misconduct

A former chief constable who was forced to resign after being found guilty of a string of misconduct charges has secured a new job with the private security contracting giant G4S.

Nick Gargan, the former chief of Avon and Somerset, has signed a four-month contract with the security firm, despite a chastening end to his police career when a £580,000 disciplinary process found him guilty of eight counts of misconduct. They included storing intimate images on his police mobile phone.

His job as a programme director – which was not advertised, nor was anyone else interviewed – was awarded after G4S had told this newspaper that it supported a “cooling off period” before senior officers were allowed to take up private-sector jobs. The company said that there had been an “immediate need for strategic advice”.