Don’t trust Whitehall to manage our money

PUBLIC contracts in chaos... 20,000 UK jobs shrouded in uncertainty... a £580million pensions black hole... Carillion’s collapse reflects atrociously on those bosses who ring-fenced massive bonuses for themselves when the business was in deep trouble.

How could these greedy incompetents get away with increasing dividends to shareholders, year after year, while running up vast debts and starving the pension fund – leaving millions of savers in better run schemes to make up the shortfall?

As for the auditors, KPMG, what were they thinking when they gave the firm a clean bill of health? Had they learned nothing from past mistakes, after failing to spot gaping fault-lines in companies such as the Co-op Bank?

But the failures don’t stop there. Clearly, Carillion’s collapse is a huge embarrassment to ministers, who plied the firm with contracts – praying its fortunes would change – long after the City sounded the alarm.

So how depressingly inevitable that Labour has seized on this sorry affair to claim private companies can never be trusted with public contracts. Voters will believe this at their peril.

Certainly, there are lessons to be learned – not least, the need for better business brains in the civil service to negotiate contracts and ensure firms meet their obligations. But the truth is that even the bills for Carillion’s collapse pale beside the colossal sums squandered on governmentrun schemes, such as the aborted £12billion IT project for the NHS.

With its naivety in business matters, Whitehall is a large part of the problem. It is emphatically not the solution.