Who's been throwing taxpayers' money about? We knew about the ludicrous spending of £71m on 66 motorcycle test centres, but it's back in the news as the coalition has ordered a review. Given that the centres have already been built, it's not clear what cost savings may be available, but the story is good politics.
The tale is put across as Labour ministers taking their eye off the EU ball, saddling us with a need for these centres - which also seem surprisingly expensive at over £1m each.
But that is what civil servants are for. Do we really expect ministers to scan pending EU regulations and take charge of every project?
Certainly it was an offensively farcical cock-up. Ministers were tired, or feeble, or just not up to the job.
But the machine failed in a major way.
By all means see if anything can be retrieved from this mess. But the process needs to be turned inside out. How can government make expensive mistakes less likely in future, without burying ministers in paper?
Similarly the six week course teaching students to walk in high heels makes a good story. South Thames College is paying Chyna Whyne, author of Mastering The Art Of Wearing High Heels, £60 an hour to pass on her expertise to 16-year-old pupils. But again, what was the underlying process?
Hard to imagine the pupils are paying for this out of their own pockets. So do the college have freedom to offer any worthless courses they can get sign-ups for? What is the incentive for the pupils? - there must be one.
Ministers have to address the process. They can't vet every course at every college. A labyrinthine state sector is always full of disasters waiting to bite ministerial ankles. Junior ministers have to do more than firefighting or mopping up afterwards.
They have to do the unglamorous but essential job of making waste less likely in the future.
The simple answer is to centralise all decision making. Simple but wrong, and ultimately ineffective. The incentives in the system have to be got right, and officials making egregiously bad decisions have to be open to exposure.
So ... who pushed for this course? Who approved it? Why did it make sense for them? How can others be - ahem - encouraged not to repeat such folly?
Those are the lessons to be learned.
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