The timetable for business in the House of Commons this afternoon, made for distressing reading by anyone that cares about competence in government.
- 1530: Brown on EU summit
- 1630: Darling on lost discs
- 1730: Kelly on DFT data
- 1730: MPs grill HMRC bosses
The EU Summit was a joke. Brown looked like an imbecile. The best spin on it was that he changed his mind (for which you should read ‘u-turn’).
The next three items all deal with the government’s incompetence in overseeing large data projects. There is no reason why all of these projects had to have gone wrong. They typically work in the private sector. The only common elements is the role of the Labour administration and it is to blame. Every time they commission the private sector to carry out a major piece of work, they put out a tender with a list of requirements. Bidders come forward and commit to the project, but the meddling tendency is such that the government then keeps changing what they want. As a result, at the end, you have systems that are chaotic and not thought through, that have run over budget and are based on flawed processes and compromise.
It is all truly amateur (with apologies to highly-skilled amateurs, everywhere).
