nowayjose

How very EU! Resign(before pushed) from a position in this country and get a cushy number in Brussels.

Has Peter Mandelson been advising UKIP?

Mark Croucher

The idea that a company with 15,000 employees would refer individual quotes for printing to the board before proceeding would be ludicrous, so quite why you suggest it for a party with c15,000 members escapes me. How often should they be presented with quotes? Every issue? And what experience does the NEC have in assessing quality of service in an industry in which none of them have any experience?

The more I read of your postings, the more convinced I am that nothing will ever meet your approval unless it is done to your specific criteria. Unfortunately, your specific criteria would tie every level of the party from NEC to local branches in unravellable administrative and micro-manged knots of Gordian complexity from which, like light from a black hole, no campaigning could ever escape.

M

gc

I broadly agree with Mark, but UKIP does not have 15.000 employees.

A company with 15,000 shareholders, however, would certainly expect its board to be insisting on chekable quotes, and I think that this is a better analogy than Mark's, in this case.

C_steam

I work for one of the worlds 'top ten' companies with 300,000+ employees.
All new suppliers or changes to a supplier are done through a full tendering process which finalises in a sign off by a director. A MAJOR supplier change may go to the board. The reason is simple - to ensure that a proper and fair process has been carried out. I would suggest that, for UKIP, a printing contract is one of its biggest controllable costs and thus should be reviewed at the outset of the contract and thereafter at regular intervals, say in this case every two to three years.

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SponPlague

When I worked for ACT Financial Systems, circa 1993, all quotes/orders even for paperclips had to be countersigned by two board members. They were taken over...

gc

Ind Dem does not require quotes when specific suppliers are given contracts for less than 13,800 euros per annum.

Maybe the UKIP system is based on that one...

Bob FM

Is there no end to the depths the anti UKIP brigade won't stoop. It may have escaped the attention of some but the vast majority of 'printing costs' are for leaflets etc, that many groups source and pay for locally or should we also refer these to a 'senior watch dog'

Mark Croucher

I take your point, but there is no central print ordering function within UKIP, and individual branches and regions use printers as appropriate: I'd broadly agree that this probably costs more money than it needs to, but against that, any attempt by the central administration to take control of this would be met with loud cries of 'interference'.

Centrally, print costs vary depending on the point in the electoral cycle, but also depending upon prevailing political circumstances, and even centrally there is no 'central' purchasing contract. I 'inherited' Speedwell Litho as 'Independence' printers from John Harvey, and did carry out a comparison with other printers before placing the first order: despite the high recommendation from John that they came with, I felt it was my duty to ensure that the price we paid was, if not the cheapest, at least a fair market price, and it was more than that, it was positively a bargain. I should mention that Speedwell, owned by a UKIP member whose name escapes me at the moment, had done this job for several years, and as a company they were not just prepared, but were happy to accept late alterations and additions, and always provided a superb service at a very modest cost, to the point where I always asked them to quote first for other jobs, and I have continued to use them outside of UKIP. Additionally, as a then elected council member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, I also recommended them as printers of the 'Journal', our inhouse publication, and they also received the contract for that. I can not say they were used exclusively, but they were always the first point of call, and my print budget varied from £ 5k per year up to, at a guess, £ 65k in an election year, and probably c£100k in 2004.

Of course, in this sense it meets what you already have, given that I was a 'director' in that sense, and controlled the largest single budget within UKIP, that for communications. I think it is fair to say that this process is followed by the rest of UKIP's employed management, as we all are (or were, in my case) aware of the intense budgetary pressures UKIP faced, and the need to make the money go as far as possible.

M

gc

Of course now we have individual "accounting units", courtesy of electoral commission rules.

Does this absolve the party of wrong doing by branches, does anybody know? Or do the accounting unit rules only apply to election campaigning activities?

Bob FM

One would venture to suggest the explaining as to the rules, lies within the title, 'electoral commission rules'.