Costly lesson in incompetence

HAS there ever been a more damning critique of Whitehall incompetence as the continuing failure of public servants to be held accountable for their flawed decision-making over regional fire control centres which has, so far, cost taxpayers £500m and counting?

It is difficult to imagine a more scathing exposé than today’s report by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee which chronicles the unravelling of the last Government’s decision to replace 46 local fire and rescue control rooms with nine regional centres.

Given the length of the charge sheet, it is beyond belief that no-one has accepted responsibility for this debacle – lesser people would have lost their jobs in the private sector for such profligacy, and the same principle should apply to the public sector.

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The mistakes are endless – a failure to understand that local 999 control rooms reassure residents; no understanding of the risks or costs; an over-reliance on external consultants and the awarding of a contract for a computer system that was never delivered because the chosen supplier did not have the relevant experience. And so it goes on.

The consequence? Eight regional control centres that are now white elephants and cost, in the case of the Wakefield complex, £5,000 a day to stand empty. And now, in the final insult, a further £84.8m needs to be spent fulfilling this scheme’s original objective – closer co-operation between the emergency services when there is a major incident.

Yet, despite this, today’s report concludes that “the careers of most of the senior staff responsible have carried on as if nothing had gone wrong at all and the consultants and contractor continue to work on many other government projects”.

This withering conclusion prompts two points. Why have those responsible, whether they be civil servants or contractors, been trusted to work on other projects when they have such a lamentable track record? And, given the scheme’s flaws from the outset, why did no Minister have the courage to pull the plug on the project until it had been properly costed and researched?

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They are questions that still need answering – and it is, perhaps, regrettable that the Public Accounts Committee did not further help this process by naming and shaming the culprits behind this fiasco.