FT writer attacks public sector cushiness

The analysis by Jonathan Guthrie is dense, the conclusion damning. A business in a financially tight corner like the government's would become more efficient. But

Both parties are addicted to the idea that they can buy popularity with spending pledges. Labour is nervous of the increasingly assertive public service unions. Cost reduction drives launched earlier this decade have run into the sand.

Median pay is higher in the state sector, people retire earlier on far better pensions, and sackings are much rarer.

The Gershon savings are mostly unattained, and the Lyons target of moving 20,000 jobs out of London looks likely to be missed. He quotes a few examples of poor value for money.

• This week, the Commons public accounts committee reported that the government is spending a jaw-dropping £2.3bn in administering £4.1bn in compensation to sick miners.
  
  
• Last week, taxpayers learnt they were paying GPs 58% more money to work fewer hours.
  
  
• Last year, "a Tory-sponsored study found no evidence that £12bn spent yearly by the public sector on business support supported anyone other than public servants".
  
  

Optimistically, he proposes that the job of state bodies is to supply services, not employment. "Most of all", he concludes, "chancellors and their opposition counterparts should stop spouting litanies of spending, either promised or delivered, as if these guaranteed better public services. They may as easily betoken epic wastage".

We do not despair of the Taxpayers' Alliance just because state sponsored waste continues. It just makes their important work more important. Today, for instance, they highlight the attempt of the highest paid Council Chief Executive in the country to ignore the Freedom of Information Act because it's more convenient for him and his colleagues.

Here, as in the other examples, the taxpayer is absent from the table. A business has its owners or outside shareholders to answer to. The taxpayer is supposedly represented by ministers. Most of them are kept too busy to delve into efficiency - and if they do stumble across over a problem, the last thing Downing Street wants them to volunteer to the media is that the government is wasting taxpayers' money, even though that money belongs to the people of our country.

That's why accountable transparency (first discussed on this blog here) is so important. It would save millions of pounds. Untold (literally untold) millions. Accountable transparency is spreading in the USA. So why not here? Too inconvenient, one suspects.

I don't believe it

As the Major government was drawing to its close, Cecil Parkinson appeared on Question Time. He cited a statistic as showing the government's good economic performance and drew jeers from the audience. "But it's true!", he protested, missing the point. You could almost feel through the screen the audience's refusal to believe anything the government was going to tell them.

Governments come into office with a certain amount of credibility, which they then proceed to draw on to bamboozle their electors. What they don't seem to understand is that it is extremely hard to top this store up again, except through a period in opposition. Every time Gordon Brown claims that "inflation" is running at about 2% a year, people will shake their heads as they think of their supermarket bills and their energy bills, not to mention their council tax bills.

Government can never admit it's wrong. So home information packs are an aid to faster property sales, the nationalised health service and state education are improving by leaps and bounds, the army gets the equipment it needs, people are abandoning their 4x4's and walking instead, crime is falling, sentencing is proportionate, energy policy is under our control, making unwilling children stay at school until they are 18 is progressive, your personal data is safe in our hands and any isolated accidents aren't a government failure, the Olympics will be splendid value for money, state spending isn't generally wasteful, and we're wriggling out of a referendum on the EU constitution.

And off they spin into their parallel universe, followed only by a few political groupies.

They can't even convince the increasing population of polar bears that we all need to act to prevent global warming. What then about the hundreds of thousands lately stranded in China by unseasonal snow? And British polls have consistently shown that the public doesn't buy the claim that man made global warming is endangering the planet, despite the best efforts of politicians of all hues, and environment correspondents across the media, including the BBC. Unaccountably the British public considers it a tax-raising ruse, though the truth is more sinister. When Mr Miliband combines two wrongs to claim that the new role of the European Union should be to fight global warming, he probably believes it! But out here we don't.

Back in the Commons, the media are starting to look more closely at the numbers with which McStalin spatters PMQs. The Spectator's Coffee House blog regularly picks up examples of claims which he can only have taken from a dodgy dossier. The Opposition have yet to get to grips with this - not even his most fanatical supporters could claim Mr Cameron as a policy wonk with a feast of figures at his fingertips.

Meanwhile the rest of us will continue to sigh as we get these broadcasts from the parallel universe - indignation long past, saying with a resigned sigh, "I don't believe it".

Just as Cecil's audience didn't.

A case for accountable transparency

Only yesterday this blog posted on accountable transparency, and suggested that the BBC might be an interesting place to start.

(For those new to the concept, accountable transparency is the revolutionary notion that we, the people, should be able to see how state organisations are spending our money. Databases and the internet now make this practicable for any organisation with halfway decent IT. Well, okay, but the USA can do it.) Accountable transparency is the new democracy.

Today the excellent Sue Cameron reports on a BBC Bonding Day. Read and cringe.

The bonding day cost £10,000. That is how they treat our money.

This money belongs to the people.

The tipping point?

Jim Callaghan remarked that every so often there is a sea change in politics, and if you're caught on the wrong side of it there's nothing much you can do.

Are we witness to this now? Mr Brown was scuttling towards an election for his own benefit, the poster sites were booked, Mr Suit and Mr Tie had been dropping teaser hints. There's no doubt that Brown was orchestrating it all, and no doubt that he lied about why he chickened out. All this even though the electoral arithmetic never worked.

This teasing united the Tories and they had to pull together. Comment has focused on Cameron's relatively vacuous memorised Conference speech, and George Osborne's pledge on Inheritance Tax.

Labour questions whether the tax cut is funded. Jeff Randall gives three reasons why it doesn't matter whether it is or not.

1. Gordon Brown's promises at the Labour conference were unfunded
2. £3bn is a pimple when state spending is over £600bn
3. Even if the sums are wrong, huge amounts can be saved elsewhere. For instance, welfare payments cost £161bn and "other expenditure" is £59bn.

If Labour pursue accountant-like claims that it can't be afforded, they'll look grey and niggardly, out of touch with the concerns of voters in those southern England marginals.

Let's not forget there was more to the Conservative conference than that. Iain Duncan Smith is to lead a task force to find ways to cut the soaring welfare benefits bill (see above). The Business commented that -

Mr Cameron stressed that people on benefits who were found jobs but refused to take them would have their benefits stopped. The importance of this is that it means the Tories are finally sold on moving the welfare state from being a passive donor of benefits to a transition mechanism for work; they also agree that those who refuse to play by the rules need to be penalised.

Most important of all, it shows the Tories finally understand that Britain must follow America’s lead on welfare; the famous reform bill that Mr Clinton signed into law in 1996, ending the automatic entitlement to hand-outs, helped slash the welfare rolls from 12.2m to 4.5m in a few years. By the end of the Clinton administration, child poverty was as its lowest level since 1979 and the poverty rate for children of single mothers the lowest since records began.

It does actually need to go beyond that since so few Britons on benefits get offered jobs in the first place - 54% of new jobs in Britain were taken by foreigners between 1997 and 2006. Sainsbury's, for instance, say that immigrant workers have a "superior" work ethic to British employees. Soft options won't deliver the goods.

Michael Gove announced an education policy which would finally break the stranglehold of Local Education Authorities, allowing charities (hurrah), voluntary groups (hurrah), and faith groups (boo) to set up their own state-funded schools with a minimum of bureaucratic hassle.

Money will follow pupils; each child in these new privately managed schools will be funded to the tune of £5,263 per head, the average spending per pupil in state schools, with a significant extra top-up for the poorest children. Although its not quite a voucher system, Milton Friedman and FA Hayek would have been proud of Mr Gove; this is the most radical yet practical educational proposal ever endorsed by the Tories.

So is this the tipping point? Brown has fundamentally damaged his image very early in his premiership. It's conventional wisdom that southern England marginals will be hugely important in the electoral arithmetic. Just one proposed tax cut has played stunningly well there in a way that won't be forgotten, and this may intensify as the reduction in households' free disposable income keeps biting (it's at its lowest level for a decade). And the Taxpayers' Alliance keeps pegging away the truth that government is hugely incompetent in the way it wastes taxpayers' money.

Perhaps there is a sea change against more tax and more spend. It's too soon to know. But just maybe historians will say this was a tipping point.

Our bloated welfare state

More from the front line. In Great Yarmouth a man claimed £3,531 more in council benefits than he should have done after inheriting £42,000 on the death of a relative. The council uncovered the money in a spot check. He has also been receiving incapacity benefit for depression.

In Northampton a man who claimed £34,363 incapacity benefit while pretending to be unable to work was jailed for 18 months. In theory he could take over 300 years to repay the money. According to the report, "his bogus claim for incapacity benefit had been brought to the attention of fraud investigators" - presumably by an informant.

A Runcorn woman has been fined £300 for failing to declare a change in circumstances which meant she received £2,824 overpayment of benefits. The council's housing benefit matching service discovered she had been receiving working tax credits but not declaring them. But it took them 9 months to bring this to light.

Electro-kevin on his blog tells us that he and his wife earn £47,000 a year between them.

I know that my remuneration will be modest compared to many readers but it is still in the region of 30% above the national average - I don't expect to live like a king and yet I am continually brassic!

But -

Here's the rub. My brother who is welfare dependant (incapacity benefit) along with his stepdaughter and her illegitimate two year-old lives no worse than I do. They also live in a three bed semi (provided at subsidy by the council) - but they have:
- Sky telly
- A modern flat screen surround sound entertainment system
- The latest PS3
- Each has a mobile phone
- They all smoke
- They have a take-away curry every week
- They are all obese
We have, and are, none of the above. Our expenses generally go on educating the kids, involving them in activities and my wife and I belong to karate and a council gym. Bruv spent his summer holiday in a chalet, we spent ours in a tent.

"You'd expect my brother and his brood to be grateful and courteous about their good fortune", he says, "but they are not".

They are often rude and look like shit - his stepson has already taken to the dependency lifestyle and at the ripe old age of 17 lives in a flat with his girlfriend and their illegitimate daughter - furnished courtesy of the taxpayer.

The simple rule of thumb ... is that if you pay people to act like scum then that is exactly what they will do.

Jeff Randall reports the view of a small business owner.

He despairs at local youngsters' poor work ethic, but heaps praise on the four Poles he employs. "They work harder and are eager to do the job properly. Absenteeism has fallen since they arrived. What's more, they are really nice people."

This is a theme that I will hear time and again on my travels. "We are too soft on welfare claimants. Some locals come along for a job interview with no intention of working. They simply want their cards signed so that they can claim benefits."

The political classes don't consider it nice to advocate policies which would deal with this scrounging. So working taxpayers like Kevin continue to subsidise them - which doesn't seem to trouble politicians' consciences at all.

Bolton blunder

This story is astonishing but true. Bolton Council spent £440,000 on a 3,000-year-old Egyptian artefact, a statue of King Tut's half-sister, which had been owned by a Bolton family for more than a century.

And what do you know? It turned out to be a fraud.

To be fair, they did ask experts before they signed the cheque. But why were they prepared to spend council taxpayers' money like this?

Italian farm subsidy fraud worth millions of euros

Open Europe reports that OLAF and the Italian authorities have revealed fraud in southern Italy involving the EU’s farm subsidies.

According to Svenska Dagbladet, the EU paid out several million euros during the period 2001-2004 for buying and selling surpluses of citrus under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. However, neither the farmers, nor the fruit nor the buyers actually existed.

School closes to go racing

A special school closed for the day so that its staff could spend a day at the Cheltenham Gold Cup reports The Telegraph, in a piece I can't find on their website.

The acting head described it as a training day to boost sagging staff morale! What is it with these people, that they think it's acceptable to close the school for a day and spend public money like this?

Gloucestershire Council are investigating.

Another example of state employees' casual attitude to taxpayers' money.

More money down the drain

The Times reports that the EU will spend £1 million on an all-night rave in Berlin on 24 March to celebrate the EU’s 50th anniversary and the signing of the Berlin Declaration, notes Open Europe. There will be 100 DJs performing at 35 nightclubs across the German capital from 11pm until dawn and young Berliners will be able to roam around the city in specially provided buses for the EU-subsidised price of €12.

What is it about politicians and taxpayers' money? They wouldn't spend any of their own cash on such stuff.

A bizarre EU rumour

Daniel Hannan reports a bizarre EU rumour.

Apparently, the European Parliament is about to open a new embassy to the UK: a vast office in Tothill Street, Westminster, employing 50 or more staff. The rent alone is said to be £1.3 million a year.

"Embassy" is surely a misnomer. It's rather as if the UK House of Commons announced it was going to open an "embassy" in (say) Manchester.

I wouldn't greatly mind, but it's my money. And will London be the only "embassy"? There are plenty more capitals to provide berths for these puffed up people. Multiply up the cost of setting up and running an "embassy" by the number of capitals, and it becomes pretty substantial.

Eurosceptics like to claim from time to time that the EU is drinking in the last chance saloon. This is wishful thinking. I don't see Nigel Farage there either - he's drinking elsewhere.

High-handed EU wastes more money

The EU's new Agency for Fundamental Rights has been launched with a budget of £72m. Its 50 staff will monitor human rights in the EU, "alongside" (i.e. duplicating) the Council of Europe, which has been doing the job since 1949.

As The Times reports, "critics believe that it should not have been built because one of its core aims is to enforce the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which formed part of the EU constitution that was voted down in France and the Netherlands".

But it gets worse. Germany is keen to revive the constitution in a slimmed-down form, and one of the possible casualties is the charter.

Franco Frattini, the EU Justice Commissioner, said that “A Europe that refuses to embrace its values, the values of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, is a Europe condemned to lose".

What does this actually mean?

And what about my human right not to pay taxes which go towards illegal expenditure?

GBH on the NHS

This was the theme of last night's Panorama, but it is also GBH on the taxpayers' pockets.

An estimated 75,000 NHS staff were attacked last year, costing the Nationalised Health Service (that's you and me) £100m - equivalent to the salaries of 4,500 nurses or more than 800,000 paramedic call-outs.

The comely reporter "spent nine months at two of the UK's busiest hospitals", though why it should have taken her nine months, goodness knows. The NHS supposedly has a zero tolerance policy towards violence against staff, but fewer than 2% of attacks on staff result in prosecutions, and staff say much of the abuse is not even reported.

The programme shows CCTV footage of a number of incidents of violence and also highlights the case of convicted rapist and kidney dialysis patient Donald Gibson, who was sentenced to nine months in prison for abusing nursing staff at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

The hospital had to spend £42,000 on security measures last year because of his abusive behaviour.

Hang on, they've got CCTV and they still don't prosecute? Gibson is conveyed by taxi to and from the hospital (we pay, of course) and they've made a room specially secure to treat him in. Staff apparently want to be caring and treat everyone. And so our money is spent.

If Gibson medically can't help it, fair enough. But that wasn't the message of the programme. The NHS's message to yob patients should be, If you're violent and there's no medical reason for it, you won't get treated, especially if you do it repeatedly.

The "caring professions" love to lavish their care at the expense of the taxpayers they don't meet. The taxpayers should have a voice too.

Motoring taxes rise under Labour

This is the theme of a piece in The News of the World.

British drivers now pour a whopping £45 billion a year into the Treasury's overflowing coffers. When Labour came to power in 1997 it was £25 billion.The nation's 31 million drivers now hand an average £1,400 a year each to government — that's nearly £30 A WEEK.

But it's going to get worse, says the paper.

Cash taken off speeding motorists has already gone up EIGHT-FOLD since 1997 to £120 million. Yet that is about to rocket again with the number of speed cameras set to TREBLE in the next six months to 18,000.

After April 1 greater freedom and flexibility will be allowed in the deployment of the cameras. They will also no longer have to be visible —even being fitted in "cats' eyes" on roads.

And, despite a million-plus online petition against plans for pay-as-you-drive charges, the government looks set on bringing in the controversial scheme.

They break some numbers down.

• FUEL TAX raises £25.2 billion — up from £19.4 billion 10 years ago


• ROAD TAX brings in £5.5 billion, up by £1 billion.


• VAT on car sales (£7 billion) and fuel sales (£6.8 billion) now raises £13.8 billion, an increase of £4.5 billion.


• PARKING CHARGES and fines add another £1.2 billion — nearly double the 1997 total of £638 million.


• COMPANY CAR TAX, which was introduced by Labour, brought in £2.7 billion last year.


• SPEEDING FINES now add up to £120 million, up from £15.6 million in 1997.


• CONGESTION CHARGES in London rake in another £200 million per year.

Then they move on to more general ground.

WHERE'S IT ALL WASTED? THE government's review into waste showed £21.5 billion a year could be saved. The government now claims to have saved £13.3bn, but £8.2bn is still being poured down the drain.

Another study said £82bn is wasted, meaning £1 out of every £6 you give the Treasury is squandered. The MoD alone has overspent by £2.7bn on contracts while 20,000 extra administrators cost the NHS £500 million.

You can argue with individual statements, but they know how to put a case over.

Petition against a tax on rubbish

With the support of the Mail on Sunday, the TaxPayers' Alliance has submitted a Downing Street petition on the proposed bin tax, which is being introduced without consultation.

The petition is now live, so please click here and sign up.

The TPA say that campaigning against green taxes is going to be a big theme for them in 2007 (hurrah), and with the help of the Mail on Sunday, this petition may yet prove very popular - especially since this campaign issue ties in so well with general resentment already over local government waste and scandalously high council tax bills.

Cancer treatment in the UK

This truly shocking story, carried in the New Statesman under the heading "Cancer treatment shames Britain", should be on every front page.

"Get a cancer diagnosis", it says, "and you might be best placed leaving Britain for treatment".

Despite official pronouncements to the contrary, the only European countries that offer a worse chance of surviving the disease are Poland and Estonia. The fact that one in three of us will eventually develop some sort of life-threatening malignancy makes it all the more scandalous that treatment here is still so poor.

Under Labour, health service support has risen from £34bn in 1997 to £99.4bn. And some £200m of lottery money was spent on high-tech equipment to deliver better radiotherapy treatment across the country.

The idea was that British patients would at last have access to the latest generation of intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) machines that can kill cancer cells without also obliterating vast swaths of surrounding healthy tissue. Cancer sufferers would be spared the debilitating toxic after-effects of radiotherapy, which can leave them damaged and feeling ill. Now radiologists think the lottery money has simply been wasted. Although they have been assured that all the promised new equipment has been bought, try as they might, they cannot find out where all these machines have gone.

So where are they?

The government's National Radiotherapy Advisory Group (NRAG) has done a "stock-taking" survey.

Its report was completed some months ago, but has not been published, and no one can say when it will appear. The cancer doctors think it caused so much dismay in Whitehall that the government has simply decided not to let people know what it says.

According to the article, the survey reports that British cancer patients get 25% less cancer treatment than the European average, while in some parts of the country it's only half. And there are not enough highly skilled but lowly paid radiotherapists to use the modern machines (which cost a trifling £2m each).

Other surveys have shown that 28 of Britain's 61 radiotherapy centres have received IMRT equipment, but only patients in Liverpool, the Royal Marsden in London, and Ipswich are getting this treatment routinely - "something that has been standard in America and most of Europe for many years". Worst of all, the NRAG study appears to show that money for treating cancer patients is as tight and the postcode lottery as much a factor as ever.

Cancer rates are climbing steadily in the UK. Every year, 120,000 people die from the disease. Apart from the lack of equipment, the target waiting time from referral to "treatment" is 62 days in Britain, and treatment can mean simply more diagnostic investigations. (Contrast cancer patients in Switzerland, who can be diagnosed and treated in as little as three days.) Target waiting times for actual radiotherapy were dropped about three years ago.

It is probably better not even to address the issue of the £50,000-£70,000 annual cost of cancer drugs, which are generally not approved for NHS patients because they are too expensive. Even before they have been made sick by their slow, outmoded treatment, any newly diagnosed cancer patients considering these facts will feel very sick indeed.

No wonder the government wants to suppress this betrayal of its voters. How many people is it killing each year through not running this one part of the NHS properly?

Journalists should be comparing the performance of the NHS to other European countries. The New Statesman mentions Switzerland. The government likes to compare our expenditure to other countries' - so let's compare the outcomes too.

James Bartholomew points out that the NHS no longer offers universal healthcare. But even an NHS which is shedding marginal activities is far too big for anyone to run effectively - let alone ministers driven by politics and publicity with no experience of running any organisation at all. There will have to be another model.

The huge, continuing waste of money is bad enough. The hypocrisy of suppressing bad news is bad enough.

Far, far worse - people are in agony and dying who should not be and need not be. And the government knows.

That's why this story should be on every front page.

(Thanks to the NHS blog doctor for the references, though he might not agree with the conclusion)

How bad is the NHS?

Could EU law actually do the NHS a favour, asks the Civitas blog, and the answer is probably not.

The case is too thin to be interesting - it's really just a hook for reviewing the performance of our Nationalised Health Service.

The NHS, at least by international standards, really isn’t a very good health system. Take the main killer diseases: cancer, coronary heart disease and stroke. The OECD measures deaths before the age of 70 that were potentially preventable by good medical care. The UK had the third worst death rate from cancer in nine developed nations in 2003. For ischaemic heart disease, the UK had the second worst death rate in 2000 and was still there in 2003. An OECD report on strokes found that in 1998 the UK was by far the worst performing country measured by deaths within 30 days. Fatality rates were often double those in 11 other countries. Despite recent reforms NHS patients still wait far longer for treatment. In 2005, 41 per cent of UK patients waited four months or longer for elective surgery, compared with 33 per cent in Canada, 19 per cent in Australia and less than 10 per cent in the US and Germany.

The Geoffrey Robinson programmes were a shocking illustration of the hugely wasteful inertia in the system. This can't be altered by decree from above - not that someone who can't even cap a GP contract would be capable of addressing such an issue. But the balance of command needs to be altered in hospitals, and that's not going to happen under a centralised public bureaucracy.

So Civitas may be right in thinking that this poor performance is largely because the NHS is a public sector monopoly.

The French, German and Swiss systems have proved the truth in this; in these countries hospitals are under diverse ownership and health care is paid through social insurance, yet the poorest people receive a higher standard of care than the UK.

Certainly someone I know in Austria has been receiving responsive specialist care which is hugely better than he will get in the UK. However, this doesn't take into account what their health systems cost those countries.

Most UK political establishment commentators choose to focus on the alleged contrast between individuals' good experiences of the NHS and their criticism of it as a whole.

But how do we compare with other countries when it comes to value for money? That's the missing number.

Scottish waste

As David Smith reminds us, public spending as a proportion of the economy is higher in Scotland than it is in most of England.

If those national governments that lost the greatest amounts of money through waste reduced their levels of waste to that of the most efficient government, they could save over one third of the costs of government spending. It does not appear to be possible, however, to cut waste without cutting the size of government.

Governments that spend the biggest proportion of national income waste more as a percentage of their spending. Thus a ‘war on waste’ alone will tend to be ineffective.

Here's an example. As it happens, it comes from the Scotsman, via Wat Tyler.

Hundreds of civil servants are being paid extra to travel to work under the Executive's flagship relocation policy.

More than 3,000 workers have been relocated under the controversial scheme to move public-sector jobs out of the capital. Under civil-service rules, however, they are entitled to receive extra cash for the excess cost in travelling to new locations for work.

Yesterday, it was revealed Transport Scotland, which has been moved from Edinburgh to Glasgow, was spending £2,000 a week on fares for 57 of its 250 staff to commute. Audit Scotland has estimated the Scottish Public Pensions Agency, which moved from Edinburgh to Galashiels, will spend more than £92,000 in excess fares over five years.

The Executive was unable to calculate the cost to some 30 other agencies forced to move, but it is expected to run to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Civil servants whose commutes have increased because of moves are also taking advantage of flexible hours to include travelling time as part of the working day.

If the money is there aplenty, discipline goes out of the window, and anyone trying to enforce it is likely to be squeezed out by the culture of the organisation. After all, why the disagreeable belt tightening when there is no advantage to be gained?

"You'd almost", says Wat, "think the politicos were engineering these relocations not to save taxpayers' money, but to shore up electoral support in favoured constituencies".

Indeed. Why would high spending politicians be interested in saving taxpayers money?

More government waste

Competition forces private companies to try to make things cheaper for their customers. When did government ever reduce the price of its services to us?

Here are some reasons why not (usual hat-tip to the Taxpayers' Alliance) -

- Lavish new MOD HQ now to cost £2.3bn

- £7m for training in positioning pencils and bananas

- Another £3.8m on Whitehall taxis

- £1.3m on unwanted Norwich bus service

PC police waste time and money

Politically correct police questioned a christian couple about their moral beliefs - after they were reported by their local council.

Quite reasonably the couple sued the police and Wyre Borough Council, claiming the incident had breached their rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion.

The police and council say they have come to an agreement regarding the claim and that they have apologised to the couple for "the way the incident was handled".

But there should never have been an incident at all. I don't agree with the couple's views. But why shouldn't christian literature be displayed alongside gay rights literature? Why did a council employee take exception? And why did the police take any notice?

Are we to be told who wasted the time and money that we pay for? Let's not hold our breath.

Displaying the fat

There's plenty of government spending that can be cut if government slims down. The Telegraph reports on a government attempt to produce an accurate picture of childhood obesity which failed because fewer than half the children agreed to be measured or weighed.

Only 48% of children agreed to be weighed. There were also poor response rates from some primary care trusts, or PCTs, which were supposed to collect the data - one in five did not send in information.

So that destroys the scientific basis of the exercise. Surely someone could have foreseen this? Or perhaps - gasp - piloted it?

The average cost of the exercise was £5,420 per PCT. There are about 300 PCTs - so say £1.6m.

The National Obesity Forum called it a monumental cock-up. The minister involved is Caroline Flint. Should we expect contrition for throwing away more of our money? Doubtless not.