Slashdot Mirror
Met Office Loses BBC Weather Forecasting Contract
An anonymous reader writes: UK weather forecasts could be run on computers in New Zealand, as the BBC announced that the UK Met Office lost a forecasting contract it held for almost 100 years. The Guardian reports: "The Met Office has lost the contract it has held for close to a century to provide weather forecasts to the BBC, bringing to an end one of the longest relationships in British media. The broadcaster said it was legally required to open up the contract to outside competition in order to secure the best value for licence fee payers. The meteorological service said it was disappointed by the BBC’s decision to put out to tender the contract, which has been in place since the corporation’s first radio weather bulletin on 14 November 1922. Steve Noyes, operations and customer services director at the Met Office, said: 'Nobody knows Britain’s weather better and, during our long relationship with the BBC, we’ve revolutionised weather communication to make it an integral part of British daily life.'"
The Met Office priced themselves out of the process. They got cocky and assumed they'd always get the contract. When companies have work from a given client for so long, they tend to get complacent. Now they're using all the PR and calling in favours from the media to kick up a fuss so the public feels sorry for them. Tough tittles! They can always make a more competitive bid the next time around.
I worked at a site where IBM did exactly the same thing, but they didn't even bother to bid on time, coming in a day after the deadline their envelope expecting the contract to be rubber stamped as usual. Not this time, though. The look on their faces was brilliant. They actually thought we were joking, and we should have given them special dispensation, disrespecting every other bidder. We've no idea what their bid was, they had to leave with the envelope. Three years later when the contract was up for renewal, they came bid on time, but were over 80% higher than what they were charging when their contract expired. Needless to say, they eventually lost all business from our company as time went on. They couldn't accept they were no longer in a position of "no one every got fired for buying IBM".
This could be one case where a tender doesn't make sense. The Met Office is obliged to give weather warnings, provide shipping weather information, etc. and if the BBC is cross-funding that then going elsewhere just means the government will have to give the Met Office more money directly. So now the public are funding the BBC to pay another company, and the Met Office too.
I'd say the Met became complacent if they haven't made the short list. Either they're charging too much for what they do, or they aren't doing it as well as the competitors who submitted tenders.
Or they might be doing it better than anyone else, but they figure that a premium service should command a premium price and the BBC's bean counters wanted Lower Prices Everyday[TM] just like on their kid's toys, milk and pet food.
The BBC (and Channel 4) are the only ones who use Met Office meteorologists, actual scientists who know what the fuck they are taking about. All others use dolly birds (and boys, occasionally) as presenters going "Scorchio" and save the facts for sensationalist "when clouds attack" type features.
I'd much rather have someone able to explain what is happening than a parroted summary and it ties in neatly with the charter to educate that the BBC has.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Fact: The Met Office is the most successful weather forecasting organization on the planet.
Fact: The BBC reports are created by the BBC from Met Office data, not by the Met Office themselves.
Fact: The Met Office have been trying to encourage the BBC to report probabilities as you suggest, and the BBC have said people are too dumb to understand that. This is stated as one of the points of friction which caused the Met Office to lose the contract.
Fact: You shouldn't comment on topics you neither know anything about nor are prepared to research for five minutes online.
That's more a comment on the low salary paid to a Prime Minister in Office. Though of course you shouldn't feel sorry for them, because they more than make up for it with millions earned from speaking and directorships once they are out of office.