The following is an extract from a Daily Telegraph article condemning Labour’s economic record under Blair/Brown:
“Not helping Labour’s argument is the string of inept projects which cost the taxpayer billions and ended up on the scrap heap. IT projects were a particular scourge of the New Labour years.
In 1998, Labour announced a programme to reform the way the NHS used IT. Predicted to cost £6.2 billion, it ended up costing £13 billion. In 2011, the Government axed it, choosing cheaper locally-led system instead.
The Child Support Agency was given a new IT system at a cost of £539 million. “Overall the new scheme has performed no better than its predecessor,” the National Audit Office eventually concluded. The Department for Transport’s Shared Services Centre also got short shrift from the auditor, which judged it to have left taxpayers “£80 million worse off”.
In total, botched IT projects wasted £26 billion from the public purses, according to the Independent.”
(for full article see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11576801/Did-New-Labour-spend-too-much-in-government.html)
But of course being the Telegraph it lacks a similar analysis of the Coalition’s record:
Andrew Lansley’s NHS re-organisation
Iain Duncan-Smith’s Universal Benefit Scheme
Michael Gove’s Education Reforms
The fact is that our ministerial system gives far too much power to individuals with insufficient scrutiny as to whether or not their schemes are deliverable or whether the cost makes it worthwhile. A detailed analysis in Anthony King & Ivor Crewe “The Blunders of our Governments” details a whole catalogue of disastrous initiatives which over the course of some 30 years has cost the taxpayer eye watering sums of money but with infrequent accountability as normally the ministers have moved on before the full extent of the horror materialises. The sum quoted above is way below what King & Crewe estimate where they estimate losses to be in the region of £50billion plus – quite staggering.
And yet the vast majority of those who will vote next Thursday will still vote for one of the two main parties – if you keep doing the same thing, don’t be surprised that you get the same result!
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