Thread by @MarkOneinFour

You know the shitty free school meal scandal? Companies taking contracts like that to offer a service to the public in need used to bank on those people being so invisible they'd never get a complaint out into general public knowledge. This is now an epic miscalculation.

Everything that is bad about the web is also what's good about the web. The web and social media allow the very quick aggregation of people's experiences as they occur and then the quick dissemination of the things aggregated. This changes things greatly

Those paltry free school meals parcels seemed to be acceptable to send out to company because 1) the people commissioning them and the people receiving them were once shielded from each other 2) the people commissioning them would in the past never seen the end product

Also the reason why this is so obviously shoddy is because its based on numbers we all understand. We all can look at those photos and go 'that's not 30 quids worth of food'. That's why care scandals don't take off as we the public don't always know how to quantify what's missing

What on paper looked like a decent amount of money per person does not, in practice, translate into that value as food. I imagine the contract never set any minimum floor for the value of the food either nutritional or monatory, but did commission on intended cost per transaction

So 'value for money for the tax payer' trumped 'value to the end recipient'. But now, that loop is closed and those who commissioned can see what the actual intended beneficiary actually got. Basically, I'd guess everyone got paid, then end recipient got whatever was left over.

This, however, doesn't mean that there is necessarily corruption in the process, and that people are just pocketing the difference. What it does mean is that such commissioning is looking at entirely the wrong measure of value for money and the wrong measures of performance

Incidentally, I also think that a school meals catering company might not be in the same business as a food delivery service. But can see how that category error might be made, and how a contract for one might be morphed into a contract for the other without going to tender