Sneaky and Naive: The Department of Health’s plan to raise care home inspection fees

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Care quality Commission

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While MPs were enjoying their Christmas break the Department of Health sneaked out a consultation paper planning a massive increase in compulsory inspection fees for care homes, privately provided ambulance services and hospitals.

As part of the spending settlement the ministry has decided to recoup the present £120m  a year subsidy given to cover compulsory inspections made by the Care Quality Commission. Altogether the ministry want to recoup some £780m over a ten year period. I have written about this in Tribune magazine

There is a subsidy is because the CQC has had to up its game and do more through inspections after the scandals exposed by  the Robert Francis report into Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and the Winterbourne View private home for people with learning difficulties exposed by BBC Panorama.

The Treasury wants to abolish this subsidy on the grounds that it must recover all the costs of inspections rather than part of them.. Superficially this sounds fine as NHS trusts will not to have to pay for the inspection of their own hospitals and ambulance services. Neither will 94 per cent of GP surgeries.

However increasing privatisation and outsourcing of services by local authorities and health trusts to private firms means that the bill for the inspections which already run into thousands of pounds could fall on councils and trusts who commission the services.

The paper reveals that 90 per cent of  care services are already privatised and privatisation is increasing in the NHS with private ambulance providers becoming the norm and mental health provision and other services being outsourced.

To try and justify this civil servants have tried to tell ministers that this could have nil effect on health provision.

This naive view is bolstered by the belief that care homes s will accept a cut in their profits to prevent an adverse health outcome caused by councils and health trusts having to cut the number of people sent there because of the increased cost of inspection fees.

This is contradicted by negotiations for the present year’s fee increases. The paper says:

“There is a risk that any increases in fees could have a destabilising effect on providers, as many providers are facing a tough financial climate, with increased running costs and reductions in income. During the CQC’s consultation into their fee levels for 15/16, 80% of providers opposed the proposed 9% fee increases for this reason. “

This is hardly surprising given that to run a care home on a profit, they already pay staff little more than the minimum wage and cash strapped councils are unlikely to pay them any more for residents. It puts into question whether running a care home  is a suitable business for the private sector. Soon they will soon have to pay the living wage. So would anyone believe they will absorb higher inspection fees into their profit margins.

 

The paper also discloses that the review will mean they will cut inspection fees for private dentists as they make a profit. It then naively assumes that the dentist will pass on the saving to patients. Does anyone believe that?

Whoever drew up these proposals cannot really live in the real world – no wonder ministers are told what they want to know rather than face reality themselves.

 

Fact and Fiction over Jeremy Corbyn’s first by election defeat of the year

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Jack Paton

Jack Paton: :Local hero Pic Credit: Cumberland News

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Guido Fawkes and the Daily Express couldn’t wait to jump on the fact that the Labour Party lost  the first council by election of the year last Thursday.

After all this was in a Labour ward in flood sodden Carlisle where Jeremy Corbyn turned up to help and talk to flood victims and they firmly  rejected Labour in favour of an Independent. Paul Staines was ecstatic predicting a deluge of losses for Labour next May as the party totally disintegrated under Jeremy Corbyn to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

But both Guido  and the Daily Express are guilty of sloppy journalism because if they had looked  or wanted to look more carefully things were not as they seemed.

Myth No 1 was that  the Labour vote collapsed as Carlisle voters following the reshuffle chaos decided Labour was finished. I bet they had more things to worry about clearing up their flooded homes than following what was going on in the Westminster bubble.

In fact the Labour share of the vote – in a low turnout of 18 per cent- marginally INCREASED – from 33.1 to 33.5 per cent.

The party that lost out more was the third placed Conservative candidate whose share of the vote DECLINED by 5.4 per cent. Funny that was not reported.

Myth No 2 was that the Independent got there by taking votes only from Labour. In fact as the excellent Britain Elects Twitter file pointed out last time it was a four cornered fight with UKIP and the Greens standing. UKIP got 14 per cent of the vote but after their disastrous performances in many council by-elections and  the Oldham West Parliamentary by-election, couldn’t even find someone to stand. So it looks as though this vote switched to the Independent.

The third point ignored by the press- and this is where sloppy journalism really takes the biscuit – is that the winning candidate is a local hero.

He is Jack Paton, a former veteran, and a long time campaigner of the old style ” pavement politics ” type which was pioneered in the past by the Liberal democrats.

As the local paper , the News and Star, reported :

“Mr Paton, who has also worked with cadets in Botcherby and is a well-known figure in the area, becomes the second sitting independent city councillor for the estate, with Robert Betton already representing this neighbourhood.

” Mr Paton recently led the transformation of a dilapidated building into a new base for Army cadets, with the conversion of a former hairdressers on Victoria Road and land behind it.

He has also previously campaigned on issues including buses in the area and on kerbs and pavements that he perceived as dangerous for wheelchair users.”

He has his own Facebook page and tweets as @sixtysjack. His Facebook page is full of congratulations from local residents and his family.

Where Jeremy Corbyn might want to take note is that he is an army veteran and a traditional working class supporter who backs our troops. He is the sort of person who would  have warmed to Kevan Jones, the junior shadow defence minister , who quit this week, and was grossly misrepresented by John McDonnell as a right winger.

In that sense the vote is a warning to Corbyn that Labour is a broad church and needs to decide how it is going to keep on side this type of voter. After all the next PM is 2020 will definitely not be an Independent.

 

 

Is a £1 million fine a drop in the ocean for Thames Water?

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thames water

Thames Water’s pollution started all of this with a £1m fine

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Today the Environment Agency is rightly triumphant in celebrating a £1 million fine against Thames Water for polluting the Grand Union Canal for  nine months in nearby Tring.

This is the highest fine imposed by the courts ever in history according to a release from the Environment Agency. But is it really going to hurt Thames Water apart from the bad publicity?

First of all the case. It was brought by the Environment Agency after Thames Water caused repeated discharges of polluting matter from Tring STW (Sewage Treatment Works) to enter the Wendover Arm of the Grand Union Canal in Hertfordshire between July 2012 and April 2013.

In May Thames Water pleaded guilty before Watford Magistrates Court to two charges under the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2010. On Monday 4 January, at St Albans Crown Court the company was ordered to pay a fine of £1 million, costs of £18,113.08 and a victim surcharge of £120.

Their report goes on:

“The court heard that poorly performing inlet screens caused equipment at the works to block, leading to sewage debris and sewage sludge being discharged into the canal. The inlet screens should take out the majority of sewage debris referred to as ‘rag’ from the process, but the screens had repeatedly failed in this case.”

And it adds: ” The Environment Agency received complaints from the Canal and Rivers Trust and from the general public about pollution in the canal. Officers attended the site on several occasions, they saw sewage debris including panty liners and ear buds in the vicinity of the outfall.”

Thames Water now says it has put matters right at a cost of only £30,000 but it seems to have taken a rather long time to do it. In the meantime it put anglers and boaters at risk from infection.

It also frankly was heaping a lot of shit (literally) on volunteers who are working to restore the rest of the Wendover Arm of the canal so that it can be used again by anglers and boaters. You can see their work here.

Yet put in context the £1m fine with Thames Water’s activities. The latest interim  half yearly figures from the company show it had a turnover of £1 billion, made a £200 million plus profit and paid out  interim dividends of £25m. So the £1 million fine is just 0.5 per cent of six months profit.

And if taken on a yearly basis – the last full year profit was £364m of which £169m was distributed in dividends. Investors include pension funds and the Chinese.

More interestingly the Thames Water chief executive Martin Baggs entire package well exceeds the £1m fine. The accounts for 2014-15 show his package in the company is over £2m for services to the group. His £460,000 salary is boosted by £53,000 in benefits including a £36,000 housing allowance, £15,000 for a company car and £2000 private medical insurance. He has long term bonuses worth over £1m with payouts of nearly £350,00 planned for the next three years. And he has a handsome £115,000 contribution to his pension.

Put all this together and perhaps £1m should be the minimum Thames should pay for any pollution they cause.Perhaps fines of £10m or a personal deduction from fat cat salaries should also be included.

The public may be pleased with the level of the fine – but for the company it seems but a  few drops from its bank balance.

The blog in 2015: Driven by Aaronovitch and Amy Winehouse

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Chris Grayling last yearsigning the memorandum of understanding with the Saudis; Pic Credit: UsSembassy
Times columnist David Aaronovitch. Pic credit :Flickr
Cotton bay; The main pool

The unlikely combination of combative Times columnist  David Aaronovitch and the tragic pop star Amy Winehouse drove traffic to my blog last year.

I doubt either have met each other but in different ways it reflects the present obsession with controversial names and celebrity culture.

The Amy Winehouse blog is three years old and is a travelogue based on the fact that I found myself and my wife staying at the same tourist complex in St Lucia that acted as a retreat for Amy when she was chilling out from drugs. I suspect the film about her has driven the traffic but the blog got over 1500 hits last year – 50 per cent more than the combined total of the two previous years taking it to nearly 2700 hits.

David Aaronovitch’s critique of my journalism in The Times led to 3537 hits when I decided to respond – though it was eclipsed by my critique of Dominic Lawson’s take on the Leon Brittan alleged child sex abuse scandal which attracted 6447 views.

Interest in the case of child sex abuse survivor Esther Baker was reflected in two high scoring blogs- at 2674 for an analysis of the challenge facing Staffs Police in investigating her case and 2096 when the first arrest was announced.

The scandal over former justice secretary Chris Grayling seeking contracts from the despicable Saudi Arabian justice system – which this blog  and Tribune broke- was a big highlight – with 4250 hits when his successor Michael Gove faced court action and 2795 when the story originally broke.

Otherwise the biggest hits were reserved for the attempt to get rid of the Speaker, John Bercow, on the last day of Parliament – with 3933 on a piece criticising William  Hague’s botched action  in changing the election rules and 2497 on the midnight email to MPs from Julian Lewis MP which alerted everyone to the dodgy deal.

The most controversial blog has been my reporting of a Northern Ireland judge’s decision to compensate a paedophile for a campaign against him by one of his victims -comments were both virulent in their hatred and support for the judge.

Altogether the number of hits  recorded by WordPress on my blog – 127,725 were down from 182,000 the previous year. I also wrote fewer blogs as I was away some of the time. But this is not the full story as the blog is getting increasing additional traffic from Linked In, Facebook and is now run on Byline.com so I am not longer sure how many hits I am getting any more.

WordPress also records I have had hits from 155 countries. Over 80 per cent (107,000) is from the UK but there were over 7,700 from the United States and over 1000 each from Australia, Ireland and France. I have had just one hit from Iran, Syria, Armenia and the Turks and Caicos Islands to name but a few.

The blog’s rating on http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.co.uk/ has gone up from number 62 to number 50 on the top independent bloggers This partly reflects my twitter following increasing to 8085.

For a small one man blog however it is gratifying that so many people are interested – given I do no promotion.

 

 

Armchair Audit: Sir Philip Dilley, the dilatory flood maestro

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Sir Philip Dilley Pic credit: gov.uk

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UPDATE JANUARY 11: Sir Philip resigned as chair of the environment agency today and will leave at the end of January. He will now have time to concentrate on his other directorships, play more golf and tennis, and spend more time in Barbados.

His resignation statement said: “I want to be clear that I have not made any untrue or misleading statements, apart from approving the statement about my location over Christmas that in hindsight could have been clearer.”

He also attacked the media for pursuing him but as Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said:“Many staff gave up their Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. Their boss should have joined them. It seemed to many that this organisation was bereft of its formal leadership when it was most needed.” 

Conservative MP for Ribble Valley Nigel Evans said Sir Philip had now made the “right judgement call”.

 

So  Sir Philip Dilley, David Cameron’s appointment to replace Lord Smith as chair of the Environment Agency, couldn’t tear himself away from sunny Barbados to turn up to see first hand the failure of his agency to cope with Storm Desmond and Frank.

Today the man who attacked former Labour Cabinet minister Chris Smith for not turning up soon enough to see the disastrous floods on the Somerset levels is rightly being pilloried in the press for deciding to spend time with his family than see any of those unfortunate flood victims.

What was disingenuous as the Telegraph reported is that his press office hid the fact that home – at the age of 60 – is a luxury villa in Barbados and not in the UK. He has a flat in Marylebone, London.

He of course says “Everyone be everywhere all the time ” but then that is not surprising given the man has ten directorships, including his own company to run, as well as posts on the board of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Imperial College, London.

And the money – £100,000 a year for a three day week – is of course chicken feed compared to the sums of money he was getting at his last big job as executive chairman of the Arup Group Ltd – the £1 billion international civil engineering business – says he and his fellow 12 directors shared £5.75 million between. the highest paid director – presumably Sir Philip – got a magnificent £864,000 a year – including a very useful sum paid into his pension – which at the age of 60 he can start drawing down.

His Who’s Who entry declares his married his wife, June. late in 2003 and has three sons, and spends time playing golf and tennis in sunny Barbados. He also is a wine buff and opera lover.

To give him credit the Portsmouth born man  made his way up in Arup from a graduate engineer to chairman.

He is also one of David Cameron’s favourite businessman sitting on the Prime Minister’s Advisory Group from 2011 to 2013. He accompanied the Prime Minister on trade missions to India, China and Russia and was a guest at a state banquet given by The Queen for the Indian President.

So perhaps it is not surprising that he can’t devote too much time to this nuisance issue of flooding -but the salary must be a very useful sum to supplement his pension.

 

 

A rare accolade to ” Lawrence of Arabia “

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Lawrence of Arabia – a painting by his friend, Augustus John.

Lawrence of Arabia pic Credit BBC

Lawrence of Arabia: Pic credit:BBC

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While the press has been inundated by flooding stories and fears of terrorist attacks  by Islamic State in the run up to Christmas , the government slipped out a genuine good news announcement  for fans of ” Lawrence of Arabia “.

The heritage minister, Tracey Crouch, announced that Clouds Hill, the tiny home of T E Lawrence , near Wareham in Dorset has been given Grade II * status – an Historic England  accolade given to only a few hundred buildings in England. The ruling gives its special protection.

The decision  taken 80 years after Lawrence’s death has been given no coverage by the press but is a piece of living history for anyone interested in the complex life of Lawrence – an archaeologist, manic motorcyclist, writer, Arabist, military strategist and a First World War hero.

For the tiny cottage as The National Trust site  tells you is just as exactly Lawrence left it when he died in a tragic motorcycle accident in 1935. It has no electric light, the rooms are simple and austere.

As Deborah Williams, Listing Team Leader, West at Historic England, said in the press release:

“Clouds Hill deserved to be upgraded to Grade II* in recognition of the importance of Lawrence’s life and the particular place which the cottage held in his heart. In 1923 he rebuilt the once-derelict cottage dating from 1808, making the fittings and furnishings himself, so it is very evocative of his personality and interests.”

The cottage served as Lawrence’s retreat from barrack life where he would entertain his friends and wrote most of his famous books. Famous visitors included Lady Nancy Astor, Siegfried Sassoon and Augustus John.

There is an irony given the timing of the announcement when the Middle East is in flames and Syria a hell hole. For it was Lawrence with the British government’s blessing who stirred up the Arab revolt in 1916 against the Ottoman Turks, committing terrorist attacks on their rail line across Arabia. His story was immortalised in David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia.

It was Lawrence who championed the Arab cause only to be betrayed by the French and British in a secret agreement that set up the current artificial boundaries between Iraq and Syria now straddled by Islamic State.

One wonders whether history will repeat itself in 2016 when Russia, the US, Britain, Turkey and no doubt France decide the fate of Syria.

For those interested in Lawrence in the year of the centenary of the Arab Revolt there is a website  run by The T E Lawrence Society. Events next year include a symposium at St John’s College, Oxford, looking back at the Great Arab revolt in September. And there is an exhibition on the revolt next October at the National Civil War Centre in Newark, Nottinghamshire.

The cottage itself is currently closed but re-opens on March 8.

 

 

A family that plays together stays together: a happy holiday season for the UK’s political-media elite – Des Freedman

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A very good read from Des Freedman.Obviously a very happy Christmas for the Murdoch dynasty, their friends and the Prime Minister. What could possibly go wrong now -only immortality eludes them. Very much a tale of power corrupts. Now they have absolute power they must think nothing is beyond their grasp.

INFORRM's avatarInforrm's Blog

rupert-murdochFamilies should be together at Christmas. That’s the simple message we should take from the merry noises emanating from Rupert Murdoch’s London apartment where, on Monday night, David Cameron, George Osborne, Rebekah Brooks and a slew of top News Corp personnel joined the mogul in capping off what has been a pretty decent year for him.

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Revealed:The ten job Tory who couldn’t live on £110,000 a year

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Mark Simmonds

Mark Simmonds; Ex Africa Minister with ten jobs. Pic Credit: venturesafrica.com

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Some 16 months ago Mark Simmonds, then MP for Boston and Skegness, resigned as Foreign Office minister for Africa and caused a huge stir in the media.

As reported here his reason for going  and standing down as an MP last May was because he found the new restrictions on Parliamentary expenses ” intolerable” and his £110,000 a year income -including employing his wife as secretary- and he couldn’t afford a second home in Central London.

“The allowances that enable members of parliament to stay in London while they are away from their families – my family lives in Lincolnshire in my constituency – does not allow me to rent a flat that could accommodate my family. So I very rarely see my family and I have to put family life first and every single parent listening to this will hopefully understand,” he told the BBC.

As this article shows he had done well out of the previous expenses system selling his Putney home in south London for £1.2m ( which taxpayers covered his mortgage interest payments)in 2010 to buy a 7 bedroom listed abbey in Lincolnshire with a swimming pool and 15 acres of parkland. His Lincolnshire home appears to have been put on the market now for £1.2m but recently withdrawn.

Now in the rush of documents released in the  last days of Parliament the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments – which vets ministers and senior civil servants appointments for possible conflict of interest -has disclosed that since he left the ministry he has had permission to take no fewer than ten jobs.

I have an article in Tribune this week on this.

The ten jobs are Adviser to Bechtel, an international civil engineering company; honorary vice president of Fauna and Flora International; non executive director, African Potash; senior strategic adviser to the private health company, International Hospitals Group; managing director, Kroll, a risk strategy company; chief operating for Counter Extremism project; chairman of the advisory board for Invest Africa; strategic adviser to First, an international organization; non executive deputy chairman of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council and chief executive officer of his own company, Mortlock Simmonds Ltd, a commercial property firm based in Mayfair, London. All but one are paid.

Three of the firms, Bechtel, Invest Africa and the International Hospital Group, he met while he was a minister.

According to ACOBA all the meetings were so the minister could understand their work.

ACOBA say of Bechtel: “ Mr Simmonds did meet Bechtel, as the company wanted to explain what its activities were around the world and to see how best it could use its UK-based expertise in developing markets. However, they also noted that Mr Simmonds was not involved in any departmental policy, the award of grants or regulatory work affecting Bechtel, and that the FCO had no concerns with this appointment.”

However the companies do find his job as a former Africa minister very helpful. As Kroll’s chief executive officer, Emanuele Conti, put it: ” His unique blend of experience gained in business and politics over many years will further strengthen our capabilities in Africa.”

Similarly  African Potash Executive Chairman Chris Cleverly said, “His significant political experience, particularly within Africa, will be invaluable as we continue to roll-out our integrated fertiliser operations, finalising the current agreements we have in place and negotiating future contracts.”

(Incidently another non executive director is former Labour Cabinet minister, Lord Peter Hain)

Invest Africa, as its limited access  website shows  it is a global private members  club for institutions, private equity and wealthy family clients, who want to invest in Africa. Speakers at private events include Cherie Blair, Bob Diamond, former Ceo of Barclays and the King of Ashanti, a wealthy Ghanaian investor. It also organises private business visits to Africa with the help of the Foreign Office.

Simmonds also has previous connections with the private health industry. Before he became a minister he was an adviser to Circle Health, a private  health company. He also took up to £50,000 a year from his own company.Circle Health walked away from running Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon.

The former minister is prevented from lobbying any government ministers or departments until August next year. After that he is free to lobby as many of his former ministerial colleagues as he likes.

What does this say about British politics. Nothing he has done is illegal and he has obviously been scrupulous in telling ACOBA about all his job offers or they could not be easily traced.

However to my mind this seems to be symptomatic of the state of British politics at the moment where for some MPs it is just another business career . A different way to make a lot of money and garner valuable contacts and connections. And probably becoming so common place at the top that some people won’t even see it worth reporting.

 

 

 

 

Child sex abuse survivors: a dangerous precedent to withdraw funding

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Graham Wilmer, head of the Lantern Project charity Picture reproduced courtesy Rory Wilmer Photography

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The recent media row over the alleged therapy techniques used by the abuse survivors charity, the Lantern Project, which led to the withdrawal of funding is a dangerous precedent.

The row pushed essentially by two newspapers by the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail ( see article here) could have much wider implications than just in the Wirral where the charity is based.

Essentially the allegations centred around two high profile survivors Esther Baker and one known as ” Darren” . Esther’s allegations are currently being examined by Staffordshire Police in a very detailed investigation which  has already led to one arrest and another person being interviewed under caution.

I am not going to comment further on the investigation particularly as the Solicitor General, Robert Buckland, has warned the media of ” the risk of publishing material that gives the impression of pre-judging the outcome of the investigation and any criminal proceedings that may follow, or which might prejudice any such proceedings.”

Indeed I am frankly surprised that both papers thought  they could comment on an active police investigation by casting doubt on the credibility of a survivor and perhaps there may be a case of drawing this to the attention of the Attorney General.

What more concerns me is the decision of the Wirral Clinical Commissioning Group to withdraw substantial funding for the charity in the wake of the Sunday Times allegations.

The reduction appears to be part of a £20m cut affecting other services but by withdrawing the £150,000 and stating firmly they disagree about the use of the therapy -Unstructured  Therapeutic Disclosure – which some people think can cause the medically  unrecognised false memory syndrome- is specifically aimed at cutting support to survivors. As it says “There is no recognition or recommendation of this approach by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).” And it questions whether the Lantern Project has the skilled staff to do this – even though the charity itself refers people back to the GPs in these cases.

However the effect of the withdrawal of the money  is not confined to just two high profile survivors – one of whom-Darren – doesn’t seem to have received the therapy anyway.

It turns out that the charity has been helping  at least 200 to 400 other families and provides or did provide a website forum for some 1000 survivors in the area. Wirral, faced with these other cuts, is not going to provide any money to other organisations – even if they could provide the services, which they can’t anyway.

Also its stance on staff could have implications for other groups that provide counselling to survivors.The Wirral decision on staffing required could provide an excellent excuse for a cash strapped NHS to withdraw support from other charities by saying they should employ psychotherapists as well as trained counsellors. And it is clear that the NHS is going to face a grim winter just providing  basic high profile services to the elderly and sick.

Those who have been concentrating on attacking the charity for supporting these two high profile cases seem to be totally unaware of the effect on other survivors who will now lose support.

They have not entirely been successful either. Norfolk Police Commissioner’s Office which is distributing the £7m to survivors organisations earmarked by the home secretary, Theresa May, is NOT withdrawing money from the Lantern Project, despite being briefed by Wirral CCG. And subject to a professional audit will continue to do so next year.

And the Daily Mail and Sunday Times coverage has had an unintended consequence- the Lantern Project has received £55,000 in two large donations from survivors or their families helped by the project. The money is part of  large compensation payments awarded by the courts on other cases taken up by the Lantern Project.

This means that the charity can continue to do some – but not all of its work. But the damage to services helping survivors has already been done.

UPDATE Dec 13: Since publication of this blog the Sunday Times (see below) has withdrawn its allegation that Esther Baker received the controversial Unstructured Therapeutic Disclosure at the time she made allegations of child sexual abuse. This does cast some doubt on  Wirral’s decision to withdraw the money.

sunday times correction

 

Untrustworthy Truss: The dishonest cover up that left farmers owed hundreds of millions of pounds

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George getting out in time before the Northern Powerhouse runs into trouble

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This week  Environment Secretary Elizabeth Truss chairs a highly publicised  emergency Cabinet committee to save large swathes of the nation from a flooding disaster. I hope she does a better job than supervising payments to  England’s farmers.

Last week her department  and one of its agencies were involved in one of the most callous and dishonest pieces of news management this year.

It has left tens of thousands of farmers without any  money for Christmas and they will be lucky if they are paid by the end of January.

The reason is her department and the Rural Payments Agency have been involved in a monumental mess over  the introduction of a new computer system to pay farmers their annual cash from the European Union.

This money is not small beer. This time last year some £1.3 BILLION was paid out to over 96,000  farmers in England and it helps keep our  food at reasonable prices in the shops.

Last week the National Audit Office revealed that the computer system set up to pay the money didn’t work properly, cost 40 per cent ( at £215m to the taxpayer) more than planned and , as a result,farmers had to revert to using paper applications.

The report even for National Audit Office terms was scathing. it revealed a total mess across Whitehall with quarrelling officials from the Cabinet Office to the Government Digital Service making a pig’s ear of the whole business.

I wrote about it in Tribune. Here is one damning paragraph  in the report:

” The Programme has been set back by numerous changes in leadership. There were four senior responsible owners within the space of a year, each bringing their own style and priorities. Repeated changes were disruptive to the Programme and caused uncertainty and confusion for its staff. The Department failed to prevent… deep rifts in working relationships and inappropriate behaviour at the senior leadership level. ”

Now this body- the Government Digital Service – has just been given an extra £200m by George Osborne, the Chancellor, so it can digitalise driving licences and passports.  If their handling of farmers money is anything to go by, you will find you won’t be able to get a driving licence or passport by the next General Election.

You might wonder why you have not heard about this mess.  A copy of the damning NAO report was sent to every national newspaper but their reporters deemed it too boring to publish. The situation was condemned by Meg Hillier, Labour chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, but it fell on deaf Parliamentary lobby ears.

But worse than this  the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs deliberately misled the public and the media about this state of affairs.

Last year when the first farmers received their cash under the old system, Elizabeth Truss couldn’t wait to boast, in a run up to the election, how successful the government had been in getting the money to farmers. You can read about it here.

This year this completely misleading statement was put out and Elizabeth Truss was nowhere to be seen. It boasted of  33,000 farmers receiving the cash. Last year it was 96,000. In other words it had fallen by 65 per cent – an appalling state of affairs.

To my mind the whole saga shows we are governed by a Metropolitan elite – with no press interest in the plight of anyone outside London and complete disdain for rural issues. That is why obviously Elizabeth Truss thought she could get away with no one knowing anything about this mess. And she has succeeded.

There is a great opportunity for Labour and the Liberal Democrats to take this issue up – it chimes with the parties’ interests in backing grass roots politics away from Westminster.

There is also a sting in the tale – do you know the European Union can fine the UK for not paying the money promptly. A similar problem some years ago meant the department was fined over £600m.  So due to ministers’ incompetence some of your taxes – will go to pay millions of pounds of EU fines. You couldn’t make this up.