Stupendous Incompetence by the DfT and others

I have been reading Edward Leigh MP (Gainsborough, Con, so he's my constituency MP) valedictory speech as chair of the Parliamentary Accounts Committee  on Tuesday 30 March  (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmhansrd/cm100330/debtext/100330-0017.htm#10033082000059) He said:

"We hear so often about the sharing of back-office services, as if this was a great achievement. The PAC has heard great claims about these back-office functions. Let us look at one. The Department for Transport planned and implemented a shared corporate services project. That is the sort of language that the Treasury loves. This was carried out with stupendous incompetence. Rather than saving the taxpayer £57 million over 10 years, which, of course, all adds up to these £11 billion of  efficiency savings, it will, because of the incompetence with which it was carried out, cost the taxpayer an extra £81 million, so no efficiency savings there. Perhaps one reason was that the computers spewed out instructions in German. Perhaps the thinking was that the only way to be efficient in Whitehall is to speak German. Unfortunately, most of the clerks in the Department for Transport do not speak German, so do not place too much credence there."

Well that about sums it up. All the political parties claim they will make big cuts in government spending by using such techniques, but the governance of departments by senior civil servants is so poor  they end up spending more  than they save.

One problem is that although there are ever tighter restrictions on politicians and their relationships with suppliers and contractors there are far fewer restrictions on their Sir Humphries.

Paul Reynolds, Lib Dem PPC for North West Leicestershire writes  in Lib Dem News (26 March 2010): "There have been two disgraceful scandals over helicopter purchasing (by the MoD) wasting hundreds of millions of pounds. The responsible civil servant was rewarded with a lucrative job with helicopter suppliers. The scandal of NHS computer systems has been well publicised, with billions of pounds wasted, but senior IT staff responsible gained jobs with big firms that supply NHS IT systems.  The same  happened in road building (and he's not referring to  Marples Ridgeway 50 years ago), and with Customs and Revenue. And it does not stop there. Senior regulators have joined companies that they have been regulating, and senior officals have awarded large contracts to consulting firms in which they own shares, and then made a killing by selling those shares once they have risen as a direct result of the contracts awarded by the  very same civil servants."

It is more than stupendous incompetence, it is corrupt even if it legal .It is time we, the people, revolted and demand accountability. One way would be to reduce central government and divolve to local levels where politicans are directly accountable to the local peole. I've covered that area before on this blog so I won't repeat myself.

Meanwhile back at the stupendously incompetent Department of Roads (sorry Transport) . Friends in the transport industry disparage the DfT's IT  initiatives because they fail to operate sensibly and waste loads of money.

For example take the DfT  TransXchange.  It  is a data format intended for both the registration of bus
services with the Traffic Commissioners and as a general data format. It doesneither well and permits wide variations in interpretation and ambiguities.

 An expert has commented to me :"I have had a quick look at the documentation [of a particular element] and I'm flabbergasted ... [detail removed] ... Madness. They are incorporating meta data about presentation into basic data ..."(Meta data is data about data)

Another expert  commented:
"TransXchange is going the way of JourneyWeb and probably other UK DfT initiatives. The people defining these standards ... [may not] be particularly talented, or simply thrive on creating maximum complexity (quite possibly commercially driven). Our experience is that there is no way we can influence these standards. In the past every attempt has been labeled has "they are being difficult". A very clear stand by [the German journey planner company] HaCon vs DfT left them out of the UK market ..."

And a friend in the business has written to me:
"These formats have been under development for ten years. Ill thought out, technically inept, and continually being respecified by ad-hoc committees, they have huge consequential costs in consultancy and software development. They have been a colossal and unnecessary waste of public money.
This has also put back the prospect of decent integrated UK-wide public transport information by years.

"Unfortunately, being directly involved in work arising from these projects I cannot risk being seen to publicly criticise them - we have already been warned off by a public official. However, anyone caring to look into them would find a can of worms."

I rest my case.