Jul 2007 16

BBC Brussels Bias3

Antieu We blogged a while ago about a BBC probe into its own bias.  Last week we had the BBC smear campaign against the Queen.  Now the BBC is probing the Today programme to gauge the extent of its bias in favour of the European Union.

In a letter to Sir Michael Lyons, UKIP Peer Lord Pearson claimed only one in five interviewees on the Today show held a eurosceptic viewpoint.  Lyons’ reply pledged an inquiry by the BBC Trust into Euro-bias.

This is hardly surprising.

For years the BBC has been pilloried for its taxpayer-funded Euro-bias.  When the Euro was on the political agenda the BBC commissioned ‘Referendum Street’ where an ‘average’ street debated the pro’s and cons of the Euro and then voted – shock, horror – for the Euro.  This all came at a time when the overwhelming majority of the public were firmly opposed to the Euro, and have been since.

This means your money paying for views you don’t accept or want thrown through your TV screens day in, day out. 

Not that this development is anything to cry about.  With the BBC under even more scrutiny the public will quickly come to the conclusion that it needs to be privatised, so its views can reflect the demand and opinions in the market and not the wishy-washy liberalism of the metropolitan elite.

Jul 2007 16

24/7 Government Delayed Due To Technical Operating Difficulties0

Estimated cost* of government websites

As regular BOM readers may recall, back in 2001 Tony Blair held a Special Information Age Cabinet (see this blog). He breathlessly announced:

"I want the UK to be the world’s leading Internet economy… I am bringing forward our target for getting all Government services online to 2005… people and businesses will be able to access Government services 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Last week, the National Audit Office updated us on progress. For some reason, it seems that despite spending £1bn, and despite ongoing costs of £208m pa, the stock to form the 24/7 departure is still stuck on its inward journey at Crewe.

As it happens, your correspondent spends a deal of time on government websites, trying to track down information. It’s rarely a good experience.

Sites such as the Department of Health, the Home Office, or the Office for National Statistics, contain huge masses of stuff. But their indexing systems are usually either incomplete or impossible to fathom, while their dedicated search engines are very poor, throwing up a million possibilities or nothing. You end up scrabbling through page after page of dense text, clicking on a whole string of links, opening a massed confusion of new windows, swearing and spilling cocoa over your keyboard.

In fact, unless you know specifically where to look, it’s usually faster and much much kinder on the nerves to Google.

The NAO user survey found the same thing:

"Most department and agency sites were unfavourably compared with participants’ experiences of commercial sites, especially banks and travel sites. Participants said that they found department and agency sites hard to navigate, particularly when arriving at the homepage. Internal search engines, in particular, were found to be unhelpful in finding the information being sought."

Part of the problem seems to be the not-invented-here-syndrome: a deeply entrenched unwillingness to use off the shelf industry standard solutions. Not only does that mean we taxpayers have to pay more, but the resulting system isn’t tried and tested.
To make matters worse, since 2004, the government has thrown its previous website strategy into reverse. Originally it let every tinpot department and offshoot set up its own independent site. The result was 951 separate identified websites- an extraordnary number with an extraordinary pricetag.

Our flipflop government’s new cunning plan is to do the opposite: to slash this number, and focus instead on just two so-called supersites: Directgov and businesslink.gov.uk.

The question is, why should we believe that be any better value for money?

The NAO is certainly not convinced (para 3.11):
"There is no parallel to the UK’s planned supersite strategy overseas and interviewees from our comparator countries viewed it as a very radical step."

A VERY RADICAL STEP.

Where government IT is concerned, those are the very four words you never want to hear.
*Footnote- The NAO’s departmental website costs are only estimates because "many organisations could not provide any costs for their websites". But why would they bother? It’s not their money.
Jul 2007 15

Weekly Waste Round-Up 670

Shutting after five years

In the news this week:

£25m school shut after just five years- "Plans have been made to close a secondary school in Essex built at a cost of £25m five years ago. Bishops Park College in Clacton (pic above) opened in 2002 and was hailed as a state-of-the-art school for 900 pupils… Mike Davis, school head, said "[The council] know they got their numbers fundamentally wrong – at the end of the day the county council has spent something like £25m on a school that should never have been built." (BBC News 10.7.07- htp Zulqar C)

£48m blown on useless community trust- "A community trust charged with spending £48m of public money to improve a rundown estate has been criticised for wasting funds on failed projects and consultants. Marsh Farm Community Development Trust was set up in 2001 by the government to help regenerate the Marsh Farm area of Luton… The Trust, which has seen 41 directors resign over the past five years, has also spent about £3m on consultants… A present director of the Trust, who has asked not to be named, expressed concerns about the information directors are being told. "Since the time I’ve been there, we’ve received no financial information whatsoever. The one item we got was the end of year report. There’s no interim or quarterly statements which they are supposed to do. That’s in the governance. We are supposed to get them to ascertain whether these projects are financially viable and being conducted correctly. I’ll be absolutely blunt with you, if Marsh Farm Trust closed down tomorrow people in Marsh Farm wouldn’t mind because they’re getting nothing of it now." (BBC 13.7.07; htp Jon D)

£111,000 bill for crackdown on peace protester- "THE true bill for the police crackdown on anti-war protester Brian Haw in London’s Parliament Square last year exceeded £111,000, it emerged yesterday. The sum – revealed by Scotland Yard in new figures – is more than four times greater than first estimated. Some 428 police officer shifts and five police staff shifts were devoted to the overnight raid to scale back Mr Haw’s sprawling "peace camp" on 23 May… Police put restrictions on him under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act." (Scotsman 14.7.07)

Council green advisors cost £100m pa- "Council leaders are paying out £100 million to fund an army of 3,500 workers to tackle climate change. Despite continuing disputes within the scientific community over the causes of global warming, how profound its effects may be and even its very existence, a nationwide investigation has revealed massive spending on new local authority staff with job titles such as "carbon reduction advisors" and "climate change managers". The Taxpayers’ Alliance, calculated that councils on average now employ eight such people… the average salary paid to such staff was £29,283, suggesting a total expenditure by councils across the UK of £102 million. News of the spending comes as many local authorities face criticism for axing weekly rubbish collections and reducing long-term care for the elderly." (Sunday Telegraph 15.7.07)

Total for week- £173,111,000

Jul 2007 13

The Land Of Golden Goodbyes0

So long suckers

The NHS financial crisis is costing us a fortune. Brown’s seven years of plenty may have come to an abrupt halt, but in an organisation legendary for squandering public money, that translates into ever more, and ever crasser wastefulness.

This morning we learn of yet another huge golden goodbye for a departing NHS manager:

"David Johnson, the former head of a regional strategic health authority, was one of about 70 staff who left the organisation when it was abolished as part of a restructuring programme. The 50-year-old received a package worth £899,810 including salary and pension arrangements."

Described as "a lottery win rather than a payout", Mr Johnson’s package is part of the estimated £320m splashed out by the NHS in redundancy payments during the current crisis.

This is mismanagement on a huge scale. The NHS is not some bombed out car maker, but an operation that has benefited from massive growth in revenue over recent years- a doubling since Brown turned on the taps in 2000. How on earth can it now find itself having to declare thousands of redundancies?

Of course, we know the answer: all that money was blown with very little - if any – thought to the future. New staff were taken on in droves and in haste. There was no effective manpower planning, still less any vision of where the whole bloated edifice might be heading or need to change.

Another measure of the same thing is the continuing jobs crisis for newly qualified health professionals. We’ve spent billions on training them, but post all those mega pay rises, the NHS suddenly discovers it can’t afford to take them on.

Last year, we blogged the shortage of posts for thousands of newly qualified nurses, estimating it had cost us £0.5bn in wasted training (see here). Last year too, the BMA estimated we’d wasted £1.4bn on training doctors (at £250 grand each) who couldn’t find UK posts.

Today we hear about the same problem with physiotherapists. They cost us £30 grand to train, and it looks like 1500 of them will not get NHS jobs this year. The Blob just trained far more than it was going to employ. Another £45m tossed on the fire.

Truly madly deeply spectacularly irredeemably buttockclenchingly hopeless management.

And of course, it isn’t just the NHS.

Yesterday we blogged the case of the 180 DfES civil servants who had absolutely nothing to do but were left in post anyway. Management apparently just ignored the problem.

And earlier this week we got an update on the disastrous Rural Payments Agency. We’ve blogged that fiasco many times of course, including the Public Accounts Committee meeting where ex-CEO Johnston McNeill spilled the beans on just how badly the whole thing was managed, all the way up to the spineless power-without-responsibility performance of Defra ministers (see here).

Now McNeill has been back before the PAC to say he’s considering legal action against the government for unfair dismissal. That’s because they sacked him without any prior warning or even any indication they thought his performance was unacceptable. We’ve already paid him £250,000, including £60 grand for unfair dismissal, but now he says:

"I’ve had no disciplinary hearing, I’ve had no correspondence about what exactly it is I have done wrong, I’ve had no opportunity to appeal."

And as anyone who has ever sacked anyone for poor performance knows, you can’t just do it. There are procedures you have to go through, written warnings you have to give, difficult conversations you must have and document. All to meet employment protection legislation laid down by – yes, you guessed it – the government.

The reality is, as we’ve said many times, you wouldn’t trust the average government department to run a whelk stall. Hopeless at strategy, hopeless at planning, and hopeless at execution. That’s pretty well a clean sweep.

There’s just one mystery.

Why do we trust them to spend 43% of our incomes?

Jul 2007 12

Fruit Fiasco1

Hey kids! Here’s a cool way to waste £119m!

Nanny’s simple-minded attempt to get school children eating more fresh fruit and veg has been a total flop.

The idea was that school kids only eat crisps and sweeties because they aren’t given the alternative of fresh fruit and veg. Give them that alternative free, and hey presto, the problem’s solved.

So the government set up yet another top-down programme, with loads of money but very little idea how it would actually work in practice.

As it happens, there is an internationally recognised project working in this field, and it’s based at Bangor Uni. Called Food Dudes (pic above), it seeks to find practical ways of persuading kids to eat more healthily.

Yes, I know. Food Dudes. How excruciatingly toe curling. But having scanned their website, they do seem to have practical ideas.

Naturally the Department of Health pretty well ignored their recommendations. Instead,despite virtually no evidence a simple hand-out scheme would work- and many good reasons to think it wouldn’t- they went ahead with a £119m top-down programme.

Sure enough, it’s been a complete failure. One of the Bangor Profs says:

"We could see it was making no difference whatever. There was a decline in uptake overall if anything.

It is extraordinary that many millions of pounds of government money can be spent on schemes without getting a shred of evidence."

Prof, we’ve got news for you- Big Government does that all the time. Indeed, regular BOM readers will recall the £1bn wasted on the similar, and equally shambolic, Childhood Obesity programme (still continuing despite abject failure).

Nanny rarely knows best.

Except of course, when it comes to wasting our money.

Jul 2007 12

Make Bribery and Corruption History0

Just give us the money
This year we British taxpayers will shell out £4.7bn on the government’s international aid programme; that’s nearly £200 for every British household.

Setting aside the highly contentious issue of whether taxpayers should be forced to contribute to overseas charity in the first place, do we get value for money?

As we blogged previously, the aid industry has long been a murky corner of government spending, where the action takes place well away from critical eyes here at home, and where it is often impossible to measure success. From the notorious groundnuts scheme onwards, past government initiatives in third world countries have wasted huge amounts of taxpayers’ money without much benefiting recipient countries.

Are things any better today?

Ah, no.

The vast bulk of current UK aid is channelled through the Department for International Development (DfID), an organisation that has become synonymous with inefficiency and wishful thinking. For example, as regular BOM readers will recall, they currently spend an extraordinary £0.5bn pa (12% of their budget) on our old friends the consultants. Overall, according to ActionAid, around one third goes on "phantom aid", which does not benefit the world’s poor at all.

Shocking enough. But another insight into DfID comes from people who work in the international contracting industry. They tell of what happened when Clare Short decided to switch from tied aid (ie aid tied to the third world recipient buying from a UK supplier) to untied aid.

The idea was that with untied aid, instead of being forced to buy rotten old British products and services, recipient governments would be able to shop around for the best and most suitable deal available from any supplier, anywhere in the world. And we generous British taxpayers would simply write the cheque. That would have to be better, right?

Er, wrong.

What’s happened in the real world is that recipient governments- or more precisely, recipient politicians and officials- now have an even freer hand to extract bribes from the world’s suppliers. We British taxpayers supply the money unencumbered, free on board, so they can simply phone around to the South Koreans and the Chinese touting for the biggest bribe. Whoever pays it gets the biz.

Brilliant. Short’s half-baked plan has actually produced an explosion in bribery and corruption. And sadly, in places like Bangladesh and Nigeria, it hardly needed encouragement.

Now, yes, British contractors obviously have an axe. And you’d have to guess these companies can only operate in some markets on the basis of escalating douceurs (cf the allegations in the BAE case).

But you can be sure they haven’t made the whole thing up.

So how much of our aid spending is going on bribery and corruption?

The number has to be BIG. The World Bank has just estimated bribery is costing $1 trillion globally; that’s a staggering 1.5% of world GDP. Elsewhere, it’s been reported that the "special loading" on the price of those Saudi Tornados may have been 32%.

Our ballpark estimate is that we British taxpayers are currently spending at least £1bn pa topping up the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt third world leaders.

Remember that next time Mr Brown boasts about how much of our money he’s giving to his good causes.

PS The picture shows ex-President Mobutu of Zaire, who became a byword for corruption. It was estimated he built up a fortune of $5bn lodged in various Swiss banks.

Jul 2007 11

More money wasted on waste at Tower Shamlets6

Early this year we released our Town Hall Rich List which showed that Tower Hamlets, one of the poorest boroughs in the country, had 27 employees earning more than £100,000 a year. One of those 27 individuals was a Mr Alex Cosgrave, who earns £148,173.38 as Corporate Director of Environment and Culture.

According to the council recycling league tables announced today, which name Tower Hamlets as the worse council in the country for recycling, Mr Cosgrave is not exactly providing the service local taxpayers must expect for forking out that much each year for his services. This is despite the fact that the council has spent £3.5 million in the last year alone attempting to expand its services, including council workers "doorstepping householders to encourage them to be greener" and local mosques "encouraged to spread the word at prayers."

Not only that, but the council proudly announces that it offers £50 vouchers to 10 properties each month who dispose of their rubbish in a manner the council deems fit. Clearly all this taxpayers’ money that is being thrown around by the council is not working, so predictably there is talk of wasting yet more money. Apparently central government is thinking of wading in to increase recycling in Tower Hamlets – "In 2006 the government threatened to send in a recycling "hit squad" to Tower Hamlets."

At this rate, it won’t be long before government starts doling money out to people who monitor their neighbour’s recycling patterns and then run off to the local council office to snitch on them.

Jul 2007 11

Non-job of the week0

Smilingbin Something’s happening at Bradford council.  Usually when we trawl through the Guardian every Wednesday we find a job that shocks and leaves us shaking our heads wondering what fool came up with such an unbelievably pointless job.  But it’s only ever one job from one council here and there.  This week Bradford council splashes out for 14 jobs, the total salaries of the jobs on offer (without factoring in pensions and operating costs) amounting to over £1million, the highest being a ‘Strategic Director of Regeneration’ going for £120k a year.

But our non-job among the plethora of jobs offered at Bradford council is the following:

“Assistant Director Cultural Services

Up to £75,000

A highly motivated individual, you will have the vision and ambition to deliver and develop cultural services across the district of Bradford.  Our Cultural Services will improve the quality of life for all our citizens, contribute to our place shaping programme and attract visitors and investment into the district.”

…and that’s just from the Guardian.  The full job specification can be found here and the personnel specification can be found here.  As you can see, aside from a four line advert in the Guardian, Bradford council lays out 10 pages of waffle about a non-job costing the taxpayer a ridiculous amount of money. 

As this goes on, as our essential frontline services such as the police and health services fall short of the funds needed to keep us safe and healthy, councils still find hundreds of thousands of pounds to squander on ‘cultural’ services.  This forms yet another sad example of the bizarre priorities in local government.

Jul 2007 10

Rewards for failure expose hypocrisy of the politicians0

The Department for Work and Pensions announced today that there will be a 5% cut in the funding of the Council Tax benefits service. The Local Government Authority is claiming that unless there are “significant increases in council tax”, these cuts would lead to a decline in benefits.

"The LGA said the cuts would result in either a reduced benefits service or "substantial increases in council tax …. LGA vice chairman Sir Jeremy Beecham described the proposed funding cut as "unreasonable and unfair." - BBC

Of course, we all know in reality that council tax will just go up yet again to plug this gap whilst local government continues to waste our money and resources, and services for local people will continue to deteriorate. What’s really “unreasonable and unfair” is the regressive, extortionate council tax. Council tax increases beat inflation year after year.

Indeed since 1995 whilst income and pensions have increased by 50 and 38 percent respectively, council tax has more than doubled! Unsurprisingly then, council tax is driving taxpayers, and pensioners in particular, into poverty. It is council tax that hurts the very poorest and most vulnerable, and enforced cuts to benefit administration in local government will just fall back as a cost on local residents in the shape of future council tax rises.

When it comes to plugging "holes" in budgets, town hall bureaucrats have form.

Jul 2007 10

Latest criticism of the Olympics by the PAC0

It’s already four times over budget and today the Olympics get another a rap on the knuckles, this time 2012logo from the Commons Public Accounts Committee.
Committee Chairman Edward Leigh said to the BBC it was “worrying” that arrangements for monitoring progress and risk weren’t in place.  During the hearing, Mr Leigh had said:
Q2: “That sounds very logical, but if you look at figure 2 on page 10 there is a massively complicated structure.  There is no single person in overall control, is there?  For instance, this is a recipe for arguments and delay, particularly between whoever happens to be Secretary of State and the Mayor.” 
This explains in part why the original £2.4billion estimate has been dwarfed by the now £9.35billion overspend.  Sloppy mistakes, such as ignoring the costs for omission of tax, contingency fund and security, show how unrealistic the original cost estimate really was.
It’s staggering that government expected to manage such a grand scheme without the necessary oversight needed to keep costs under control.  This is yet again another instance of the government wasting taxpayers’ money when it could have been avoided with a bit of foresight and common-sense. 
Jul 2007 10

Do chips make us healthier?0

…not if they are microchips that hold your medical information.  According to new American research reported today, electronic health records – touted by policymakers in Britain and America as a way to improve the quality of health care – failed to improve care delivered in routine doctor visits. 

"Of 17 measures of quality assessed, electronic health records made no difference in 14 measures, according to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.  The study by researchers at Stanford and Harvard Universities was based on a survey of 1.8 billion physician visits in 2003 and 2004. Electronic health records were used in 18 percent of them.  In two areas, better quality was associated with electronic records, while worse quality was found in one area, they said." – Reuters

This is slightly disturbing when you consider how much money the government has spent on an NHS IT project to create a centralised database of NHS records (upwards of £12bn at the latest count).  Not only is the project massively over-budget, but this new research does raise a question about whether one key aspect of the new system will deliver any real benefit to patient’s in terms of better clinical care. 

It might be more convenient not to have hard-copies of medical records sent all over the country when people move GP, but we didn’t need billions of taxpayers money spent on a national IT database.  Giving everyone an NHS-branded, damage-resistent 2gb memory stick on a key-fob would have done the job just as well.  And the individual would own the data, which would aid privacy. 

Clearly too simple a solution for our politicians.

Jul 2007 08

Weekly Waste Round-Up 660

£2.3m Enviro-Twaddle

In the news this week:

£2.3m blown on nappies fiasco- "A Government minister has delivered the news that millions of parents have been waiting to hear: traditional nappies are no more environmentally friendly than disposables. After a four-year study the Environment Agency concluded that "there is little or nothing to choose between them". It found that the damage caused by burying disposables in landfill sites was matched by the electricity and greenhouse gases generated by washing and drying cloth nappies… The Government-funded Real Nappy Campaign cost taxpayers £2.3 million over three years. Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: "This is a quite farcical waste of taxpayers’ money, and is yet more evidence of how politicians are unable to run programmes effectively"… Local councils offer gift vouchers or cash rewards to mothers who use traditional nappies. Councils already running the reusable nappy scheme include Three Rivers district council, in south-west Hertfordshire, which gives parents £80 if they use a nappy laundry service for six months." (Telegraph 3.7.07)

£480,000 for reorganised NHS chief- "An NHS manager was given a payoff of £480,000 because he could not find another job after a government-ordered reorganisation. The settlement awarded to Chris Town, the former chief executive of Greater Peterborough Primary Care Trust, was four times his £120,000 salary. Mr Town had been seconded to act as interim chief executive at the neighbouring Cambridgeshire trust, but was paid off after he did not get the permanent job there or at the revamped Peterborough trust." (Times 6.7.07)

Cost of unwanted EU space venture rockets to £1.3bn- "The EU’s ill-fated Galileo satellite programme is a complete shambles. Running six years late, its commercial backers having pulled out, only one little satellite (made in Britain) has yet been put up (by a Russian rocket), and the European Commission now wants EU taxpayers to foot the colossal bill for an ongoing programme which will cost UK taxpayers alone an estimated £1.3 billion, and will run at a massive loss. All to no discernible purpose." (Sunday Telegraph 8.7.07)

Another £34.6m on management consultants for NHS- "£34.6m of public money set aside for frontline health care has been spent on employing private firms for external consultancy. Figures released by the Welsh Assembly Government show that the amount of taxpayers’ money used to pay for management and organisational consultancy has rocketed from £1.75m in 1999 to more than £9m last year." (Western Mail 3.7.07)

This week’s total- £1,337,380,00

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