Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Labour and how not to make things work

I had dinner this evening with an executive who, two years ago, was seconded to the Office of Deputy Prime Minister.
You may ask why. Simple. Prescott and his office had a budget of £500,000,000 ( yes that's half a billion) for some daft project, due to last three years. But after TWO years, they had still not decided what to do to get "value" for the taxpayer. So my friend was brought in to give guidance and get the ball rolling. He spent six months sitting in endless, boring meetings, were nothing was decided, except the date of the next sub-committee meeting. Noone would take a lead, make a definitive suggestion, or even take up any of the ideas put forward by the massed ranks of consultants called in to produce report after report.
At the end of his six months ( 2.5 years into the project) some £150million had been spent, with nothing at all to show for it, apart from ever growing piles of mouldering paper.
Sound familiar? Well, the NHS has suffered from the same thing - except they wasted even more money by implementing the changes, again and again and again so that - surprise - we are actually back to where it all started in 1997. So that's not just £150million, it's something like £36 BILLION wasted. And er, we are back where we started because, er, well it worked better than anything else we suggested, only now we are making it even better by er a) getting rid of nurses b) doctors etc etc.
It's the same with every other department. Labour actually has no ideas, and never had. As I've said before - no principles and therefore no worthwhile action.
Just the wrong action.

2 comments:

Whispering Walls said...

It's an outrage. Why don't you stand as a Tory candidate?

kinglear said...

Ah WW, noone would ever select me - I am too outspoken and nonPC to make it. But one of the daughters, though.... However, she makes Genghis Khan look like a pussycat