Stale Cream

I have a saying: 'Cream rises to the top; you can't push it'. I may have to rethink that: Quango fat cats reap the price

Recently our local prospective parliamentary candidate wrote in our local paper about DEFRA. He reveals it has spent £1.1 billion on consultants. And yet has managed to acheive almost sod all.

I still mind forking out, but wouldn't so much if the result(s) were any damn good!!! And there seems to be no effective way to get rid of them, leaving them clear to squander more and more, again and again.

Fat cat row over public sector pay

Some great, telling comments in feedback.

Slim down the fat cats

Peers help themselves to £300 a day tax-free

Indy - Pay for public sector bosses rises by 12.8 per cent

Indy - Gordon Brown's efforts to enlarge Blair's 'big tent' are beginning to backfire spectacularly - As much a Friend of..' as those he critiques, by enough smoke to indicate the presence of fire... only with no bright sparks. Just smouldering members.

Reader's Digest - November - Feeding Time in Quango Land - Sadly no link. I will write to them and post here.

Apparently, these things are set up 'to be the most effective and efficient method of conducting government business, and are closed down when no longer required'. Really? How many have been pensioned off? I use that word on purpose, because from the jobs ads I see in the papers, an awful lot look to be in it for a very long haul, golden parachutes included. Once folk are in public service jobs, they seem to be impossible to dislodge, no matter how unproductive or inept.

I also note 'Ministers are accountable'. Well, great. But how does one get a hold of the accounts to see how good they are at overseeing all this? How does one measure the ROIs on the bazzillions these guys spend? Especially when the order of priority seems to be self, bonuses, staff, offices and empires, before we get to comms budgets to drive up 'rates' that in turn are tied to bonuses, which just has to be a major conflict of interest at best. And that's before any money actually gets to doing something where it is meant to go.

My area of interest, the environment, is riven with such waste and squandering. And with no sign of a let-up. In just the last few weeks I have seen at least two 'new' campaigns doing roughly the same thing as each other, with different target-rewarded quangos at their hearts. They just seem to exist as highly expensive, rewarding (for those in them) game-playing entities with no sensible measures of value. And I can't see for the life of me see why, other than to create yet more layers of fat beholden to political masters come voting time, and perhaps a nifty unelected layer of protection for when the sh*t hits the fan and some compliant sacrificial goats are required to fall on swords for a huge payoff.

Only even this doesn't seem to apply as they all are hanging on for extremely dear life.

Pathetic!

BBC - Quango pays director's firm £2m - 'Nice work if you can get, if you can get it..'