LETTER: Government’s record of waste

I do not normally read our Horsham MP’s articles but couldn’t resist that of 9th January where, as usual, a politician is being disingenuous with the facts. He, like a number of his party, continue to blame the previous Government for the global meltdown, but this time it is ‘vanity leases’ which surely were merely inherited from previous Governments?
By The Newsroom
Published 26th Jan 2014, 08:00 BST
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He claims to have raised £1.3 billion ‘for the taxpayers’ but he has omitted to mention the amounts of taxpayers’ monies wasted during his tenure, to name a few cases;

1. £500,000.00 paid to consultants by the Dept for International Development in 2012. Justine Green ordered ‘an urgent audit’. Nothing has been heard.

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2. Unknown amounts for more than 90 public appointees since 2010 charged with representing particular interests in Government or ‘finding solutions to difficult areas of policy’. Research by Academics at King’s College London revealed fewer than 46 per cent had professional expertise in the area they were being asked to look at.

3. Unknown billions of pounds wasted by Ministry of Defence over the years which had an inventory of £40.3 billion at the beginning of 2013 and is running out of space to store it.

4. £40 million wasted in handling the West Coast rail franchise with the possibility of the Government being sued for a further £40 million on another franchise that had to be cancelled.

5. £26 million deficit run up by NHS Direct on the disastrous NHS 111 call centre contracts.

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6. Unknown (to us) millions wasted on various computer contracts, NHS, MoD, immigration, etc, cancelled because they were not properly thought through.

7. Unknown extra cost of trying to recruit part time military before regulars are made redundant. Includes redundancy payments then extra payments to companies persuading them to release any new Territorials for 12 months.

It would be interesting to see how all this waste compares to the £1.3 billion, could he possibly let us know in his next article?

He states they ‘will never sell off national assets like Downing street, etc…’ which is just as well as there isn’t much left.

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Our country has been stripped of most British owned manufacturing and utilities and just recently the French company Total has announced it is buying into yet more of our possible energy sources through fracking.

It also looks increasingly like the NHS will be run by American companies, HS2 will be run by Chinese, new nuclear power by more French and so we continue to sell what we can to overseas buyers seemingly without any thought about what will happen to us in the future when we have no control over anything.

We give millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to these overseas manufacturers through the so called Regional Growth Fund, some then close the businesses and I doubt they return any of our money.

The latest is £10 million to the foreign company which owns Lotus and Proton and it now looks as though it will be winding up.

E. DELGADO

Parry Close, Horsham

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