Culture of Waste

OK, I’ve started again now. Dangerous thing, ranting. It’s habit-forming.

This had me swearing at the radio this morning. Birmingham City Council organising a “day of culture” in support of its bid to become the UK’s first City of Culture, whatever that means and however it might differ from European Cities of Culture such as (snigger) Liverpool and (guffaw) Glasgow. And culture means just about anything, it seems. If you’re in Birmingham and you visit an art gallery, the Council are dying to hear from you. If you do a bit of dancing, do tell the Council. If you cook a meal or go out on your skateboard, the Council want to hear about it. No really, they do.

But if you forget to tell them, don’t worry, they’ll find out. From another page on this specially commissioned, taxpayer-funded website: “Throughout the 24 hours there will be roving reporters, out and about, visiting events across the city to report back live on the website on what the city is getting up to. Armed with video cameras they will capture Birmingham enjoying culture in its many forms!”. God Almighty.

And the Conservatives are getting slammed for wanting to save money ?

Birmingham City Council, it will be recalled, was recently the focus of protests and demonstrations when they announced that they need to make 2,000 job cuts over the next year. Birmingham City Council, the organisation that brought us “Winterval”. Birmingham City Council, which has overspent its budget to the tune of £75m. I wonder how they did that, then ?

All this is being fronted by some publicly-funded Council-offshoot called Birmingham Cultural Partnership. They claim to be working to: “Get more local people involved in culture (including arts, libraries, music, dance museums and galleries)”

Well, don’t. Work to educate your kids, keep your streets clean, help the homeless and mend the potholes. Leave the rest to the people. And save them a fortune in the process.

Too Much, Too Hoon

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is responsible for investigating public spending and taking the government to task over waste and inefficiency. As you might expect they've unearthed some real shockers, so when they report on one project which they say was among the worst they’ve ever examined, you know it’s going to be bad.

Step forward, the Department for Transport (led from the front by everybody's favourite idiot)

They’ve been managing (no, hang on, that’s a gross misuse of the word) responsible for a “Shared Services” project designed to cut departmental administrative costs and increase efficiency. The headlines from the catalogue of disaster unveiled by the PAC are:

...the project was supposed to cost £55m and deliver £112m in savings;
...instead, it’s cost £121m and saved just £40m;
...that’s a net cost to the taxpayer of £81m, for something that was supposed to SAVE £57m;
...confidence in the underlying IT system is so low that only two out of the department’s seven agencies are using it…
......which might partly be explained by the fact that (among other things) it’s been issuing messages to users in German.

Edward Leigh, the admirable PAC Chairman, doesn’t normally mince his words but even he doesn’t use phrases like “stupendous incompetence” on a regular basis. But he did in this case. He also described the outcome of this project as “lamentable”.

What Leigh does say - on a basis so regular that he must feel like a broken record - is that senior officials should be rewarded for success and penalised for failure. He also talked about the Department for Transport’s need to overhaul its project management, review the capabilities of its managers and subject future projects to robust challenge.

All of which will have gone in one ear of the Department (if we’re lucky) and out of the other. A DoT spokesman is quoted as saying “As with any large scale and long term project, there have been aspects of Shared Services that have taken longer to implement than others…..We welcome this report and will be responding to its recommendations in due course, with an update on our progress."

Which roughly translated means: “We could not give a toss”. You'll already have guessed how many sackings or disciplinary proceedings have taken place as a result of this fiasco. That's right...a number less than one.

Full story here, if you can stand it.