Freedom to waste

Rachel Sylvester has space to fill this week so she has written a piece about which politicians are cavaliers and which roundheads / puritans. This would be sad as a parlour game after lunch on Sundays, and certainly didn't deserve publication.

Despite a fondness in some quarters around here for orotund language, most of our umbrellablog colleagues cleave to the roundhead tendency. Certainly none of them could be described as wrong but wromantic.

Quite apart from being unilluminating, Ms Sylvester's analysis is actually wrong. The government is not in the hands of puritans. How can we tell? Turn a few pages of the Telegraph and you will find a review by Gillian Reynolds of a recent File On 4.

It is a tale of Regional Development Agencies living high on the hog at taxpayers' expense. A modern puritan would have sacked the offenders at once. But there would be little to stop their successors doing it again.

In the tentacle state, local satraps run unfettered and unchallenged. In the nationalised health service, heads of hospitals spend large sums, and in some cases kill people, with no effective supervision. Lack of accountability could work if there was a gulag for these people, but our government's softness means they just get punished with a fat pay-off.

For the extravagances revealed in File on 4 there is no sanction at all.

In general, complaints to the minister responsible for RDAs, Margaret Hodge, receive comment but are handed back to the agencies for action. As the programme made abundantly clear, since there is no open accounting process, no public scrutiny of performance or probity, these expensive, shadowy, quangocracies are not being held duly responsible.

It seems unlikely that Lady Hodge in her role as Culture Clown is also responsible for RDAs. Indeed, she would be better employed on the back benches, and it's inexplicable why she remains a minister (is she really the best the government can offer?). However, the minister responsible might compel the local satraps under their wing to introduce accountable transparency, so that all spending is itemised on their websites and they can be held to account, as increasingly happens in the States. They could make the RDAs more accessible (geddit?).

Support the Taxpayers' Alliance. A bunch of flowers to Gillian Reynolds for bringing this to another audience, and hair shirts all round for the Regional Development Agencies.

That money belongs to the people of our country, not to you.