Monday, June 21, 2010
Puzzle
I was intrigued to read the other day that a project to upgrade the helicopters used by the search and rescue service is to be cancelled or reviewed with a potential saving of £7b. This struck me as an awful lot of money in these straightened times - although it was not clear over what period the saving was to be made. There can't be all that many people who get rescued who could not have been rescued by lower-tech means, so how many pounds a head are we paying? If we rescue 7,000 people over the period of the proposed investment, the added cost - never mind about whatever costs we already have and will hold onto - would be £1m each. Perhaps persons rescued by helicopter should be asked to contribute on a means tested basis. Whoever thought that spending £7b on this was a good idea? Should he or she be asked to contribute from his or her pension pot?
I then have a tilt at Mr G. and find that the helicopters used for search and rescue come in a variety of shapes and sizes, have a variety of roles - including hunting for submarines - and there are maybe 200 of the relevant helicopters in service around the world. Is the project about all of these? He also tells me that the service is about to be privatised. So what is the £7b all about?The expected cost of paying a contractor to do search and rescue over the period of the contract?
One could have some fun devising some macabre performance indicators but I guess that would be in rather poor taste so I desist. Leave that to the Monty Python/Sacha Cohen (our one that is. Not the figure skater from over the pond) crew.
Next stop the web site of the search and rescue service itself - the UKSAR - to see what I can find out from there. To find that the service seems to be run under the auspices of the Department of Transport rather than the Ministry of Defence. To find a framework document for the service which runs to many pages but which does not appear to contain the pound sign, the humble '£'. So not much about cost-benefit analysis there. Much more about radio frequencies and dividing the UK and the adjacent seas up into search and rescue areas.
So I am left rather confused. It seems probable that we were to have spent rather more on search and rescue than it was really worth, that we were still running the sort of service that one would expect of a first rate power, but that was about all. One hopes that there is some analysis somewhere for the axemen from HM Treasury to bite on, but it is not very visible to your bog standard taxpayer.
PS now intrigued by the word tilt, usually in the phrase full tilt. Because I have just started reading the Nibelungenlied where they do a lot of tilting, as in jousting and knights in armour. Or tilt yards at Hampton Court. A quick check of OED reveals a variety of meanings of the word, some quite unexpected. But it also confirms that 'at full tilt' comes from charging at full speed at someone with a lance, with a view to impaling the someone.
PPS and while we are on helicopters we had two patrolling the air space over our house for a short while the afternoon. Perhaps someone had shopped the BH for mowing the front lawn without having donned protective clothing.
# posted by Jim @ 9:36 AM 
