It seems some numbers are too big and some mistakes too large for the public to digest.
According to the Commons Public Accounts Committee, the MoD has wasted £1.2 billion on procurement processes which failed to buy a single armoured car over the last decade.
Instead it dipped into Treasury reserves leaving a funding shortfall for new armoured vehicles until 2025. The Minister for Defence Equipment says the procurement problem is not really that bad.
End of story.
How can that appear in a couple of paragraphs and be relegated so quickly to the back burner?
Every year for a decade the MoD has wasted twice the amount of cash being lavished on the Olympics Opening Ceremony – without a squeak from us.
And – as if to stick a contemptuous two fingers up more clearly– the MoD says it cannot "identify anyone who has been held to account for the clear delivery failures". Oh yes and it spent £564 million of the cash earmarked for armoured cars on consultants. But it'll cut thousands of military and civilian personnel jobs to shave 8 percent off its spending. Is that because we plan to fight fewer wars? No comment.
Och well then. Par for the course.
It's public procurement. The numbers are big, the procedures are byzantine, the end users are soldiers doomed to defend distant lands we will doubtless forsake and no physical constituency is directly affected by the missing cash.
Just every taxpayer. So we shrug and move on to get excited about smaller mis-spending scandals with names, faces and identifiable winners and losers.
Ochone.
Yeah Lesley, wasting public money is terrible..from the MOD spending money employing British scientists and engineers to design future army vehicles, to British companies manufacturing 'failed' prototypes..wasting tons of money buying British components and employing well paid British scientist, engineers and workers to construct and test these prototypes.
OR.. we could go the cost saving 'Scandinavian way' and not even spend money on these things... but no wait they do...they just mostly source their equipment from America.. apart from the few things they get from good old SAAB.
Can't wait for your column in the Sunday Post complaining about the 'fuel poverty' that has been caused by the rush for expensive 'green energy'.
As always give my love to the "feisty team'.
P.S. I'm not an SNP member, but I have to remind everyone every other week because???
Posted by: pollok | December 16, 2011 at 09:07 AM