Friday, October 05, 2012
Poor saps
I should probably feel sorry for the civil servants caught up in the recent railway franchise fiasco, let us say Franchise Z.
Loosely retold, it might go something like this. Business man A was making a jolly good thing out of Franchise Z.
But the rules say that Franchise Z has to be re-tendered once every so many years and its time had come, the idea being to stop people like A making more money than is decent out of government contracts. Even the Tories have some scruples. So the race was on.
As it turned out business man B wins the race. Business man A screams not fair to the roof tops. He may well arrange cozy chats with chaps he knows on the ministerial team. One of these chaps is the minister C who signed up to B, but who is now persuaded that he has made a mistake. Not fair on the staunch and stalwart A. So he instructs the luckless civil servants to review the paperwork, just to be sure that everything is ship-shape, bristol fashion and above-board.
Surprise, surprise, the civil servants take the hint and duly find something wrong with the process. Not due process at all. The race has got to be rerun with subtle changes to the rules. I observe in passing that all this is likely to generate plenty of scraps for the legal eagles. Will they grow fat to the point that they can't take off any more?
Minister C now has to dump the blame somewhere. Guess who gets it? Still, the worst that is likely to happen is that some senior civil servant gets to collect his nice fat pension a bit sooner than he (or she) was expecting. I don't suppose they will sink so low as to dump the blame and exemplary disciplinary action on some bag carrier for some typing error.
Now who thinks that this is all a fantasy? The product (or perhaps produce is the better word) of a sour-grapes addled conspiracy theorist?
Loosely retold, it might go something like this. Business man A was making a jolly good thing out of Franchise Z.
But the rules say that Franchise Z has to be re-tendered once every so many years and its time had come, the idea being to stop people like A making more money than is decent out of government contracts. Even the Tories have some scruples. So the race was on.
As it turned out business man B wins the race. Business man A screams not fair to the roof tops. He may well arrange cozy chats with chaps he knows on the ministerial team. One of these chaps is the minister C who signed up to B, but who is now persuaded that he has made a mistake. Not fair on the staunch and stalwart A. So he instructs the luckless civil servants to review the paperwork, just to be sure that everything is ship-shape, bristol fashion and above-board.
Surprise, surprise, the civil servants take the hint and duly find something wrong with the process. Not due process at all. The race has got to be rerun with subtle changes to the rules. I observe in passing that all this is likely to generate plenty of scraps for the legal eagles. Will they grow fat to the point that they can't take off any more?
Minister C now has to dump the blame somewhere. Guess who gets it? Still, the worst that is likely to happen is that some senior civil servant gets to collect his nice fat pension a bit sooner than he (or she) was expecting. I don't suppose they will sink so low as to dump the blame and exemplary disciplinary action on some bag carrier for some typing error.
Now who thinks that this is all a fantasy? The product (or perhaps produce is the better word) of a sour-grapes addled conspiracy theorist?
# posted by Jim @ 8:36 AM 
