As the FT has noted:
Although George Osborne, the chancellor, revealed plans to increase transport capital spending by 50 per cent to a total of £61bn over parliament, the DfT will be hit with a 37 per cent cut to its operating budget. Within these cuts, the department will see a 12 per cent reduction in administration costs.
Does anyone remember the West Coast mainline fiasco, of which the BBC reported:
A "complete lack of common sense" in the Department for Transport's handling of the West Coast Main Line franchise deal will cost taxpayers "£50m at the very least", MPs have said.
The cost might be "very much larger", the Public Accounts Committee warned.
The committee accused the department of making "fundamental errors" and failing to learn from "previous disasters".
How many more of those are going to happen if a much increased sum of money is to be spent by a much reduced civil service?
Or is this a really grand day for the outsourcing giants whose fees for managing those projects are now wrapped up in the investment budget itself? Oh to be a partner in KPMG and their mates, eh? Could this be the spending review they were just waiting for?
Or is it just another mess-up waiting to happen?
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Obvious solution is to nationalise it all !!
Can the OBR not forecast this?
They do appear to have a certain skill at telling the future.
You do mean not telling the future, surely?
To prevent further obfuscation could you please ask the OBR for their definition of the future?
I will then agree with that. Or not.
Why don’t you
Richard. I see from a report in The Guardian that the OBR submitted five confidential drafts of its Autumn Statement material to the Treasury and that in each revision the forecast just got better and better for Osborne (ie. they found him more money). Of course, drafts and redrafts are part and parcel of this process, as I well know. But surely this cannot be seen as anything other than fitting “the future” to whatever Osborne wants it to be.
These forecast upgrades are all pretty big estimates
The trouble is these estimates are being spent
And so I entirely agree with you
A greater skill at selling the future.
It’s worse than you think: the West Coast fiasco is in some sense a success – by analogy to Dunkirk and the successful evacuation of *some* troops from a military debacle.
To the best of my knowledge, the rail franchises are the only privatised (former) public service with a ‘Plan B’ for the failure of a service provider by reason – failure as in bankruptcy, relinquishing the franchise voluntarily, or contract termination due to underperformance.
The return of the Hinchingbroke hospital contract might bear closer examination: it was orderly, but the public haven’t been told how much it cost – and we can only speculate as to what might have happened had it been an acrimonious exit or a disorderly bankruptcy with the electricity bills upaid.
Bear that in mind.
Sone of the coming care home bankruptcies are going to be unpleasant, to say the least. There’s no legal structure for an orderly transfer – nothing like the framework for (say) a bank collapse – and very few local authorities will have the resources on hand to intervene if two or more care homes go under with the staff and suppliers unpaid.