Jan 2011 06

UK Trade & Investment head Sir Andrew Cahn throwing our money out of the door10

The head of UK Trade & Investment, the Government’s trade promotion quango, has urged staff to dream up ways of spending more taxpayer’s money, according to the Daily Mail. In an email to the quango’s executive team, chief executive Sir Andrew Cahn reported that Foreign Office officials were worried that taxpayer’s money might not be wasted in time for the new financial year.

“The FCO is heading for an underspend and wants to get money out of the door. If we can spend money in this financial year on a one-off basis, then we can have at least £1million. Can you think of what we might do with such money.”

How about reducing the enormous budget deficit or using it to not hike VAT? Even in the best of economic times, this approach to financial cost control with public money would be outrageous. When businesses are facing closure and job losses due to tax rises such spendthrift profligacy truly is a disgrace. As TaxPayers’ Alliance director Matthew Sinclair says,

“It is absolutely shocking that while ordinary taxpayers and struggling businesses are working hard to look after their money, UK Trade and Investment are casting around for ways to spend it.  This just confirms that too often in the public sector spending is an end in itself, whether it is bureaucrats looking to grow their budgets or politicians making a shallow attempt to show they care about standards.  Now more than ever, with a huge crisis in the public finances and pressure on the budgets of taxpaying families, that culture needs to change.”

If it makes economic sense to do the specific business promotion things UKTI does, British businesses are more than capable of doing them by themselves and do not need wet-nursing from the taxpayer’s bosom. Instead of searching for new ways to waste taxpayers’ money, Sir Andrew should have been drawing up plans to abolish his unnecessary quango.

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  • Guest

    This is standard practice, by no means limited to UKTI. I’m sure many senior public sector workers (as I am) will be very familiar with the “spend it before 31st March or lose it next year” theme. We call next month ‘silly season’ for this very reason. Add to that the ludicrous notion that many public sector orgs are actually penalised for *not* spending a full year capital allocation and you begin to see how we got in to the current mess.

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  • Guest

    Whilst I deplore this particular instance of wasting Taxpayers money, I have used UKTI services in a number of very small but growing businesses to expand rapidly internationally, generating many £10′s of millions in exports of high value British manufactured products to places such as the US, India and China.

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  • Guest

    If the tax payers alliance was serious about protecting tax payers money you would start a private prosecution against “Sir Andrew Cahn” for the common law offence of conspiring to defraud the public revenue.

    His quango was conspiring to waste over £ 1 million, and he gets off scot free, meanwhile an mp who has been sent to prison for 18 months over £ 20,000.

    And the Quango’s £ 1 million is a small part of the billions that are thrown away at each year end, putting “Sir Andrew Cahn” in jail for 18 years would have a much greater affect on saving our money than the MP since his crime is over 50x more serious.

  • Guest

    Call for “Sir Andrew Cahn” to be prosecuted for the offence of “conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office” since his conspiracy to waste over £ 1 million was much more serious than the MP’s offence, along with a full investigation into who passed this down to the quango since there was clearly a larger conspiracy by the Foreign Office to waste significantly more.

    That would stop this being “standard practice”.

  • Anonymous

    More worrying is that the man is still in a job. sack him instead of the honest bloke who told the country that yes, low interest rates had been a good thing for many people.

    Seriously, the whole monstrosity of government is flawed and now no longer serves the people. It must be dismantled and large parts of it utterly abolished.

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  • Anonymous

    I’ll never forget putting a Russian jet on a purchase requisition form. The whole thing was signed off, only stopped by a mate in the purchasing department who refused it on the basis of an on cost – fuel.

    The state wastes our money because it isn’t theirs.