The cosy quangos addicted to lavish spending
How do they find so many inventive ways of handing out your money? State bureaucracy has always been the enemy of prudence. But that reality has been borne out with ever more depressing inevitability by this paper’s investigation into the irresponsible activities of England’s Local Enterprise Partnerships, the municipal and business quangos that are meant promote economic growth.
They are supposed to be engines of enterprise. Instead, these partnerships have too often created extravagant rewards systems for their own members. Conflicts of interest abound. Value for money is seemingly ignored.
As the Mail revealed, in 2014 call centre boss Asif Hamid was handed no less than £1million for the creation of new premises by the very LEP in the North west on which he sat.
Altogether, £7.3billion of taxpayers’ money has been paid to the LEPs, of which barely half has been properly accounted for. The disdain for the public purse is obvious.
The irony is that these LEPs were meant to be different.
They were set up by the Coalition Government in 2010 to replace the bloated Regional Development Agencies established by Labour’s John Prescott. RDAs became a byword for bureaucratic extravagance.
Now we learn the new vehicles for splashing your cash – which were supposed to provide a lighter official touch – are going down the same path.
The tale is typical of the Government machine, where squeals about ‘cuts’ mask an instinct for prodigality.
The £12billion annual foreign aid budget, that gigantic monument to political vanity, is now rightly seen as a racket that provides funding for dubious regimes and lucrative salaries to contractors who exploit the politically correct credulity of the Department for International Development.
ONLY at the weekend it was revealed that the Government has dished out £568.4million to Somalia, despite a UN report warning of ‘high level and systematic abuses’ of aid there.
It has been the same story at home with another high-profile policy, the Troubled Families scheme, which the Coalition launched in 2011 to turn around the lives of the problem households through targeted intervention by key workers.
At first, the £450million programme seemed to be an enormous success, with the Government claiming that in its first years of operation it had turned round more than 80 per cent of the chosen families.
Later independent studies showed that these figures were a sham. An investigation by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research struggled to find ‘consistent evidence that the Troubled Families programme had any significant or systematic impact’. Nearly half a billion pounds of public money had been spent for no gain.
Earlier this year, financial watchdog the National Audit office warned that a third of major Government projects due to be delivered over the next five years are on track to fail.
Part of the difficulty is that politicians like headline-grabbing gestures as a means to give the illusion of change.
So in January 2013 David Cameron’s Government introduced the so-called Green Deal which was meant to provide subsidies for energy efficiency measures in British homes. But the take-up was miserable, with the result that each loan cost the taxpayer over £17,000.
According to a report by the Public Accounts Committee in April this year, the Green Deal and other environmental programmes have cost ‘£3billion to date’, yet the Government had ‘achieved little energy savings compared to previous schemes’.
Just as wasteful was the establishment by George osborne of the Money Advice Service, an initiative designed to meet public concern about household debt. It was a hopeless flop, wasting £400million before it was scrapped in March.
The epic scale of mismanagement makes a mockery of all the moans from state officials about ‘lack of resources’.
A central reason that the State fails so badly is because organisations receive their funding no matter how poor their performance.
NOR are there any real consequences for officials, who move from one failing department to another. A classic example of that trend was Lin Homer, once chief executive of Birmingham City Council – where she was criticised for presiding over serious voter fraud – then a senior official at the Department of Transport, followed by highly controversial spells at the Immigration Directorate and HM Revenue and Customs. yet she was still able to retire in January with a pension pot of £2.2million.
what is so depressing is that nothing changes. The last Labour government was notorious for its addiction to spending and the quangocracy. Despite all their rhetoric, the Tories have adopted almost the same approach. After this string of recent failures, they must show more respect for the taxpayer.