I said this last year and I still agree that their should be no boundaries for firing.

Taken from Hell's Kitchen, where Ramsey fires anyone from any team who performs crap, including multiple sackings.

It would have worked last week, where people on the winning team were a lot worse than the losing team.

What does everyone think?

The current system is certainly flawed in that Shuggs can only fire someone who is in the final boardroom - like this week where Ricky Martin brought in two who actually had performed pretty well.
I'm not sure about firing someone on the winning team, though this week Steven made a complete hash and should've gone for ignoring Toms' precient warnings on the equipment difficulties.
I think maybe Lord Sid and his sidekicks should say who's going to be in the final boardroom from the losing team.

ETA. I dont watch HK - but I'm guessing Ramsey is there the whole time watching them all - so he can make a judgement that Lord Alan can't?

Yeah Ramsey oversee's the challenges/ Service, which isn't too different from Karen or Nick seeing most of it. I'm sure he will get to watch footage back as well.

The whole system stinks really. None of those in the losing team this week said there was anyone who did a bad job and they were all pleased with how it went, whereas there was a lot of discrepancies on the opposing team that actually won.

Karen never even mentioned Tom saying it was all wrong, in the boardroom, which I found strange, as they usually bring things like that up, when they ask how it went.

He definitely won't. There isn't time! They'll be filming at least eight hours or so worth of footage per camera per task - with at least four cameras, one to cover each subteam, plus talking heads, plus multiple angles (possibly? is it multi camera?)... it'd be a mess. Couldn't edit it into anything coherent.

Thing is, if he can fire people on the winning team, it just descends into "who does Lord Sugar like the least?" There's no immediate benefit to winning or punishment for losing, and the structure of the boardroom would lose all meaning.

I think it's best as is. He's got the power to double-fire, and I could see him firing the winner in exceptional circumstances - as he quite spectacularly broke with format in series 4 - but I quite like the current format. Gives the project manager and team stuff to do throughout the show. Most crucially, if it was just Lord Sugar's Carnage Room, the candidates would become a lot more passive. It's right that the project manager can influence who's on the chopping board. If they really mess up, they can themself be fired, so it's in their interest to basically choose the right people.

He does sometimes drop pretty massive hints about who the losing PM should or shouldn't bring back into the boardroom.

There wouldn't be any incentive to work as a team to win the task if anyone on either team could be fired, so it would change the dynamic quite a lot.

There was no reason to fire anyone else from the losing team this week - the task required too few things to be done and the few things were mostly done well by the losing team. You can't fire people for not being a dancer or for not fighting Duane to stop him directing the video. Ability gave one big role to Laura and the pM gave the other to Duane. there's no one else to look at. You just can't sack the winning team by declaring the win a fluke - it undermines everything.

What you can do is have sensible rules that stop one team winning with a financially unviable proposal on a sales calculation that ignored costs. You would then be able to sack whoever missed the point that the proposal was losing money and the business plan was badly flawed.

100% agree. For the most part, the candidates still do try to win the tasks. If the candidates didn't get immunity from task winning, then there would be no point and it would just dissolve into backbiting and bitching. The current system has flaws no doubt as it does let candidates slip through the cracks and get further than their talents deserve (i.e. Laura Moore and Natasha), but it's better than the others.

But, Phoenix's business model wasn't financially viable and I wish that Lord Sugar would have picked up on it. Still, as I mentioned in another thread, he didn't say at the start that costs would be taken into account and, therefore it wasn't unreasonable of Phoenix to assume they had an unlimited budget. So, as flawed as Phoenix's business plan was, I wouldn't have awarded the win to Sterling as Phoenix didn't strictly speaking break any rules and made the most money, albeit on a promise that they couldn't fulfill.
Don't forget, last year, though Jedi Jim's Asda Special Stars pitch was scoffed at, they still kept the 800,000 order and Venture won the task.

It was a poorly conceived task

Its moved slightly further, because you could argue that the retailer just discounted Jim's sales hype and ordered the concept/taste anyway. This week the concept couldn't work at all without the equipment, and somehow that had to be paid for and stored.

The basic problems though are as you say well known. Tasks are set up and marked inconsistently. One year you can win with inedible chocolate, s and another you go home because your biscuits taste bad, one week costs matter, one week they don't.

In the sense there was a big hole in the rules. Not sure the task was that different to the usual ones though - think of an idea, work it up and present and sell it. They usually don't know enough about what they are doing to produce something thats really workable. People do buy this sort of thing in real life - though it seems something anyone could design an exercise programme at that level lof understanding.

In the bigger picture, though, the task probably still helps to sift the candidates. Laura had a better week and gets points for effort. Ricky got credited with leading well ,and coming up with a decent idea. Duane suggested he could be difficult to work with and that he could get things badly wrong and was capable of doing something different to what was expected. The other team had a bad business plan and that raised questions over some. You also wonder what the concealed agenda might be. In the last young apprentice series Zara's photographic and film making skills were tested out over several tasks - he knew by the end that she could do what he said she could. Here we just don't know what is on offer - so we don't know what he wants to see tested.

Sometimes he overrides the rules and it's more open, in the Morocco task in series 4 he brought all of the losing team back instead of the PM bringing 2 people back.

Wrong, he brought in the two he felt was responsible for the FAILURE of the task, which is what you are SUPPOSED to do'

You can have contributed a lot but still be to blame.