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April 2 2006 ~ " Margaret Beckett declared: "I take full responsibility."
She meant she had just sacked one of her officials..."
The accountability of ministers was once the
rock on which the constitution was built. So writes Sir Simon Jenkins
on the RPA fiasco:
"....Only 20% of cheques have been signed, partly because a £37m
government computer has declared more than 95% of claims "unvalidated". As a
result some £3 billion cannot be released from the exchequer. Ministry
phones go unanswered, forms are lost, banks are preparing to foreclose on
overdrafts. The BBC's Farming Today programme is like a daily dispatch from
a banana republic.
...Two weeks ago Margaret Beckett, the relevant
minister, declared: "I take full responsibility." She meant she had just
sacked one of her officials, Johnston McNeill, so as to save the skin of her
farm minister, an obscure Tony crony called Lord Bach. The latter had spent
six months deriding critics of his scheme as "shoddy" and creating
"unfounded alarm and uncertainty". The shambles at Defra, the rural affairs
department, might win more publicity were a similar litany of woe not rising
from every corner of Whitehall. ..." Read in full
See also
today's Sunday Telegraph ".....thanks to the unique complexities of the system
devised for England by Margaret Beckett, and the collapse of the computer
system devised by Accenture (the same company that is responsible for the
chaos engulfing a £6 billion computer system for the NHS), the Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has sitting on the money for months.
Meanwhile farmers have been paying an additional £13 million a month in
interest on what they borrow to make up the shortfall...." Booker's Notebook