Today it has emerged that the Department of Transport's decision to award the West Coast Mainline franchise to FirstGroup was based on flawed calculations, or to put it another way, a mahoosive cock-up.
Apparently this was the fault of 3 civil servants. That sounds unlikely to me. Yes, 3 civil servants may have got their sums wrong, but they were working in a system which is ultimately the responsibility of ministers. Doing complicated calculations is difficult. I know this, because I'm a statistician for my day job, and I do complicated calculations all the time. I frequently get them wrong. I therefore have all sorts of quality control processes in place to make sure that my errors are discovered before they are in a position to do any harm.
So while 3 civil servants may have cocked up their calculations, it's inevitable that human beings will do that from time to time. If the system in which they work (for which government ministers are responsible) allows those cock-ups to go undetected, then that's not the fault of the 3 civil servants. It's the fault of government ministers.
But all this raises a wider point.
This particular cock-up came to light because it resulted in a decision that pissed off Richard Branson, and extremely rich and powerful man. Branson and his legal team had challenged the decision, which means that somebody did have to go and double-check that they'd done their sums right, at which point the cock-up was discovered.
Government departments do all sorts of other calculations, most of which are not challenged by someone rich and powerful. How many other similar cock-ups are waiting to be discovered? Is the sell-off of the NHS to private companies based on equally dodgy numbers? How about George Osborne's plan to fix the economy (which, in case you haven't noticed, doesn't seem to be going too well so far)?
I have a nasty feeling that this sort of cock-up may be an everyday occurrence, and the only thing that's newsworthy is that it got discovered.
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I guess these problems are closely correlated to this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19801666New comment
Whole Country is one big cock-up these days. It's not the fault of civil servants, typical that this shower should try and blame them, it's just the amateur way everything is done by the government now. They don't even know their own laws. They come up with these 'great ideas' without realising that they can't be enacted because they are contrary to existing law. Of course, it was the job of civil servants to point out these things before the minister just blurted it out but, I'm guessing, civil servants don't get asked these days. They think they know it all and, in reality, they are hopelessly out of touch with the mechanisms of governance on every level. I'm surprised we aren't in worse trouble ... or maybe that's all to come.
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DC and NC said people must work in the voluntary sector for their job seekers allowance and attend job clubs........sounds great. Now my shop has three brand new workers for the next four weeks (and the rest presumably) in a premises that already has more volunteers than it knows what to do with, in fact on some days I go home early because I'm in the way and can't face tidying the racks one more time.
By the way did those calculations get done wrong or am I a conspiracy theorist?