Waste created by politicians is still blowing in the wind

IN the last decade, £500m was spent in building state of the art Fire Control Centres to replace the present system.

Many are still costing the long-suffering taxpayers astonishing amounts of money in maintenance as they remain empty.

The system, which was championed by former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, was presented to us as the best way to bring the administration of the fire service into the present century to improve its performance, and those who opposed these plans were dismissed as uninformed and not in touch with reality.

Sadly, reality shows they were an astonishing waste of money and the whole system has been aborted.

A similar grandiose scheme was also foisted on the National Health Service but this consumed far greater sums of taxpayers’ cash. All medical data and patient records were to be computerised. Various estimates for the cost of between £13-20bn have been made but it has now been scrapped and the cost no doubt written off.

Mistakes are made by everyone but mistakes by governments seem to continue unabated. The major difference is that MPs’ mistakes are paid for with other people’s money and they never seem to learn from their mistakes and instead rapidly leave the mess they have created to embark on another crazy scheme.

After these hugely disastrous policies it could reasonably be expected that MPs would exhibit a greater degree of caution on any future large expenditure but this is not the case.

They are now directing their energies into destroying our countryside, for Britain is engulfed, in what appears indecent haste, in erecting more and more wind turbines and creating wind farms whose contribution to the country’s energy needs is a minimal one.

How long will it take just to recover all the energy used in their construction? What will be the cost of these imports, including their transportation and erection on site followed by their maintenance? This will, no doubt, exceed those of the former two cases many times over.

They are not attractive and in the windy weather we experienced recently from the tail end of Hurricane Katia, wind farm operators were unable to harness this gift horse as it was the wrong kind of wind. The wind farms were shut down but, never mind, the operators were compensated by the National Grid (read – our money) because they could not produce electricity. The Energy Minister, Chris Huhne, then tells us to save money by shopping around for the best energy deals but obviously feels loading our energy bills in order to subsidise the gross inefficiency of wind farms is perfectly acceptable.

What’s the bet that in the next decade we will announce that wind farms are to be abandoned as a complete failure at a cost of billions of pounds to the taxpayers?

If those promoting wind farms says this can never happen, well, similar utterances were made by so-called experts about fire control centres and the NHS computer system, and look what happened.