According to a press release in my inbox the Prime Minister said this morning:
"I believe, as a society, we should support hard work, effort, enterprise and responsible risk-taking. We should not in any way condone, but should punish irresponsible and excessive risk-taking.
"The old short-term bonus culture is gone; that there are no rewards for failure, but penalties for failure; that in the future there must be rewards for success - but long-term sustainable success and not just short-term gains."
So that's why you appointed Sir David Walker and Greg Moreno was it? It looks to me like they've got the most massive rewards for failure.
Rhetoric is not enough Gordon.
We want to see real action.
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Rhetoric is all this government are good for, especially the PM.
Labour have presided over the worst excesses and failures of the city, and it wasn’t long ago Brown was singing their praises, says it all.
I pity any party who inherits the UK after all this, where do you go from here?
Most of their IT projects could be categorised as “irresponsible and excessive risk taking”, and according to most commentators failure is mostly caused by excessive political interference – so who is going to be punished for that?
and don’t even get me started on the tax credit fiasco… about time GB practised what he preaches.
Richard,
This point is probably related more to the general theme of your postings.
I am curious to know why champion the payment of taxes only to put them in the hands of fools. Is it any wonder people try to minimise thier tax contributions when lunatics waste them at the stroke of a pen? When Government waste taxes and then hike up tax (usually by stealth) to subsidise their incompetence, I quite rightly feel aggrieved. I would be interested to hear your views/defence of such a position.
Infrequent Observer
IO
I believe in democracy
I do not believe, unlike Alastair that thsoe in the public sector are any less competent than those in the private sector
I think they should have been more robusts with banks: the problem was created by banks though
Likewise IT: the private sector tried to sell this stuff and said it would work. It did not.
Richard
take a look at the minutes of the meeting chaired by Blair, which was the inception of the NHS gateway project. Seems relatively clear that the idea started as political spin. In project terms it was not properly specified from the start, and scope creep was endemic. And even worse, it was imposed on rather than championed by the NHS. You cannot blame the public sector or the private sector for this – blame rests with the policy makers.
Richard, I do not think the public sector is necessarily less competent than the private sector. A point I have regularly made is that the public sector is less efficient in allocating scarce resources, but that is not the same as competence. I would however agree that you regularly misinterpret this point.
I would say that the main problem with IT systems, like the NHS Gateway project, is that they were outsourced. They are of their nature huge and complex systems and hence risky and the few suppliers can and do make excessive profits, especially in the maintenance and upgrade phases. It is in their interests to tie requirements to what suits them rather than what suits the customer. This is totally wasteful. If the civil service had maintained and developed the expert systems people they used to employ, yes there would still have been miscalculations of required effort but it would have proved far more efficient in the long run.
NHS Gateway project. Huge – yes. Complex – not particularly; its only patient records and appointments so not exactly rocket science. But so badly specified that they probably won’t get to the maintenance and upgrade phases.
Don’t know what you mean by outsourced, but it is common practice to contract with specialist suppliers for systems like this, mainly because in-house development is usually always a disaster.