The Gray Monk

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July 14, 2006

Here's another nice mess .....

Its good to know our money is being so well spent isn't it. After all, we are constantly told that Whitehall is such an efficient and non-corrupt organisation constantly worrying about expediture that they even have targets for measuring how much value we get for our tax pound. At least that's what they would like us to believe.

The revelation that the drive introduced by Tony and his Cronies to "revolutionise" Whitehall's delivery by launching a great drive to install IT for everything has run out of control and is a disaster from start to finish really should come as no surprise. You only have to understand two things about it - first that it is being scoped, specified and managed by Civil Servants, and second that it is being managed under the "Prince 2" project management system. As anyone who has ever worked with or to the Civil Service knows, they are incapable of managing a Binge Drinking session in a Brewery and as for the "benefits" of Prince 2, all it really ensures is that there is an "audit trail" of forms completed against every motion or activity connected to the task, not that the task has been properly scoped or even has achieved what it was supposed to. It only ensures that if the project is not properly scoped or planned, it will deliver all the faults and all the pitfalls - but it will do so consistently.

The wastage on IT runs into billions of pounds in one department alone (The Home Office naturally!) and even the Passort Office is having (five years on and more billions of tax money) having to revert to filling in forms manually - because the "online" version is either unusable or unreadable. To this bit of IT lunacy one must add the hugely expensive and still only partially operational NHS system and the Air Traffic Control system which has taken several potentially major disasters and a lot of kicked butts to sort out - again millions over budget, and the morons at DeCLoG - the Department that replaced Prescotts empire at the ODPM - have already issued contracts (open cheque books more like) to "prefered suppliers" to build the Regional Control Rooms for Fire Police and Ambulance Services which no one, except Whitehall and their toadies in the "management" of these services, wants.

How many more billions must we watch these incompetents throw into the pockets and bank accounts of their chums on the "preferred supplier" lists the Treasury issues, before we throw the whole damned lot in jail for fraud? We have pensioners suffering hardship because their pensions are inadequate (thanks Gordon Brown for the ongoing raid on pension fund incomes), we have our armed forces relying on outdated and unstable equipment and vehicles because Whitehall Wallahs spend the money on fancy chairs and decorating their offices, and we have a Health Service in crisis because the Civil Service has loaded the entire thing with worthless managers who know nothing whatever about managing a Health Service and manage by committee!

Time to clean house. Time to make the Civil Servants responsible for these failures and the the wastage accountable. Time to treat them in the same way that any director of a private company that behaved as they do - sack them and prosecute them for fraud.

Posted by The Gray Monk at July 14, 2006 09:25 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Gorse Fox at July 14, 2006 08:50 AM

Posted by: The Gray Monk at July 14, 2006 09:03 PM