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Picture credit: msmail
Channel 4’s Dispatches duly gave the audience tonight a full hour’s litany of woe, exposing public spending waste on a massive scale.
But the programme was not Fighting the Trillion Dollar Bonfire by another name, just a damp squib.
I was encouraged when I saw tonight’s Channel 4 schedule because the Dispatches programme was promisingly titled: How They Squander Our Billions and trailed an investigation into profligate Government spending, citing some of the particular projects that I have written about.
I think, somewhat ironically, that the programme about wasted public spending was itself a wasted opportunity.
Why should I say that? Because Dispatches simply reeled off “shocking” example after “shocking” example, without sparing any time whatsoever to analyse properly the causes of the waste, or more importantly the likely remedies.
Call it a sloppy programme, if you like, call it lazy, if you must. I’ll settle for calling it a squandered opportunity.
For once the problem of the Trillion Dollar Bonfire could have been addressed by a mainstream broadcaster but once again the ambition of the programme makers did not extend beyond the soft target that presents itself so easily to the media, almost every day: poor government thinking.
Why do people [in government and the media] find it so hard to consider the obvious questions:
- Why do these situations arise?
- How could things be different?
The Dispatches programme included a view from the Taxpayers Alliance that the causes of waste could be attributed to two factors: “structural government incompetence and operational government incompetence.”
My own answers to these questions are:
- We don’t have properly joined-up management
- We need effective information systems
I have been writing about these problems for years and emailed more newsdesks than I care to remember. Computer Weekly and Computing have responded with support but it has taken the onset of a serious economic recession for the mainstream media to show any interest, despite such clear evidence of the problem over a number of years.
But, of course, we need to solve the problem, not just talk about it. The Trillion Dollar Bonfire still seems a taboo subject, not so much the Elephant or Gorilla in the room escaping notice, though, more like an entire invisible menagerie.
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