"a shockingly familiar story of spiralling costs and poor value for money"

[Jim Graham]

I always distrust people who use cliches like "you couldn't make it up".

 

Jim, you live in a simple black and white world where public sector is bad and private sector is good. I don't know what you think about Allen Stanford, News International and all the other private sector scandals of recent years. I get the feeling if a teabag is wasted in a town hall somewhere that's a bigger story than Lehman Brothers crashing.

 

I think you're making your sense of outrage up.

 

 

 

I think you'll find the likes of Crapita, A4e and G4S are pretty pi**poor as well. They waste a lot of money but nothing like the scale of Whitehall. I think you need to differentiate between scandal and public money scandals. It's no surprise to me that the media are immoral or amoral or both.

 

When it comes to taxing hard working people with punitive rates on fuel and council tax in particular it's an absolute national disgrace that anyone is allowed to waste a single penny never mind £500m. Will anyone take responsibility for it? Of course not.

 

I am not outraged, I'm absolutely disgusted. Some ordinary hard up people in this country are put in prison by the establishment for claiming a bit too much in benefits. But establishment knighthoods in the civil service can squander £500m and face no sanction whatsoever. It absolutely ******* stinks to high heaven.