Patricia Hewitt etc.

There was a fine article in yesterday's Daily Mail on government "over spending" on certain, ahem, "projects" which is well worth reading in full. I'll restrict myself to this snippet...

Four years after it should have been finished, we have spent £6.4 billion — or £300 for every household — on an incomplete patchwork of incompatible [NHS computer] systems.... two companies were paid £1.8 billion for the project. But one failed to deliver the products ordered, while the other, BT, is being paid £9 million to install systems for the NHS while charging £2 million for the same systems elsewhere...

... former Labour Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt flits from overseeing the hopeless NHS computer project to a highly-paid directorship at BT. Do we laugh or cry?

The Mail is a conservative paper, so giving the previous Labour government a good kicking comes naturally to them. However, they are not mucking about, here are a few other headlines from the same edition, in descending order by value...

Tory donor snaps up Olympic Village at a knock-down price - and it's costing you £275m!

BBC lavishes £8 million on consultants despite 'cost-cutting' drive

Nice work if you can get it: 43,000 jobs lost, but bank boss exits with £5million

Queen’s Windsor estate gets £224k annual farming subsidy from EU

School where just two pupils are looked after by seven staff to stay open at a cost of £110,000 per year

If you look at all these examples in the round, and cross reference them to actual HM Treasury figures, it appears that about a third of all government spending (certainly more than a quarter) falls into these categories, i.e. the amount being stolen each year is rather more than the annual deficit.

All of which makes a mockery of Kelvin Mackenzie's assertion (in the same edition!) that all Cameron needs to do is "Cut pensions, slash benefits and stop spending money to the skint elsewhere in the world" (the last one is definitely a good idea, but we just don't spend that much on old age pensions, and barely anything on cash benefits).