Sickened by health fiasco

So what are ordinary, tax-paying, vote-casting members of the public to make of the fiasco that is Edinburgh’s new children’s hospital?

A public inquiry is now to be held. Let me predict how that will go. It will take months to set up, will run for years and will cost millions.

It will identify most of the faults by all the parties connected with this sorry project but, crucially, it will fail to identify who should actually be held accountable, while concluding that ‘lessons will be learned’.

It will probably tell us little more than everyone can already speculate. A major i nfrastructure project was commissioned by a Government with an iffy record in major infrastructure build projects. There was a questionable specification in certain technical areas, an inadequate procedure for monitoring the work and a contract which appears so naively one-sided that the taxpayer has to pay for the building even though it is not fit for human occupation.

Would anyone in Holyrood buy a house like that?

If Nicola Sturgeon truly wants to ‘learn a lesson’, here’s one – that if the SNP seriously wishes to run this country as an independent nation, then she needs to hire decent help.

Clear out the dead wood at Holyrood – idealists and social workers promoted over their level of incompetence do not make a management team. The First Minister also needs to keep it quiet that she was the health minister who commissioned this hospital in the first place.

PHILIP MILNE, Banchory, Kincardineshire.