Monday 7 June 2010

FakePrivateCompany Of The Day

An article in The Metro alerts me to a bunch of troughers (who pay people money to temporarily lose weight) calling themselves Weight Wins, whose website merrily boasts that "NHS Eastern and Coastal Kent was the first to commission the service from Weight Wins" and includes a rent-a-quote from long-established quango The National Obesity Forum, which is a lobbying front funded by Sanofi Aventis and Abbott Laboratories (see here).

According to the Companies House website, the company 'Weight Wins Limited' is dormant and the company whose number is given on the Weight Wins website is called 'Accelerated Concepts Limited', whose accounts shed absolutely no light on how much cash they raked in from the NHS.

The only clue we get is from Weight Wins' own factsheet (pdf) which says "Costs - The cost to the PCT is £185 per place plus a programme administration fee which varies with PCT requirements. Total programme cost is £50,000 - £250,000, with 150-1,350 participants per programme." i.e. about £200 to £300 per fattie.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Is there no end to this? Paying people to stop smoking, paying people to lose weight...I'm sure your readers can find more of the same out there, all using YOUR money to stop people doing something or other.

This is insanity and I hope that the toothsome two will set fire to these money spunking quangos and fake charities.

Enough is enough!

Mark Wadsworth said...

TBY, it's be nice if the Chuckle Brothers scrapped this, but unfortunately, they promised to 'protect' NHS spending, and all this crap comes out of NHS budget.

Unknown said...

Ah, the old ringfence eh Mark. Cameroon was asked about this today but I can't remember his answer as I was still reeling from his remark that we all would have to suffer for years to come to save on the interest repayments on our, err, their deficit. They needed the money to keep the NHS going and fighting Climate Change??? What?

Still, he's gonna follow the Canadian model and "ask the people" where the cuts are needed most. It's time to put pen to paper methinks. Or will he just talk to the "stakeholders" as he thinks they are 'real' people.

Mark Wadsworth said...

TBY, they'll talk to 'stakeholders'. If they meant it seriously, they'd just go round shutting down departments.

I mean, who would even notice if they shut down DTI, DCMS, DFID, DECC, DEFRA, about a third of NHS and so on? Apart from the people who work there.