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Senior Member
Join Date: Nov 2005
Location: Welwyn Hatfield (Herts.)
Posts: 1,878
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More government waste - Rover
Jeff Randall lays INTO phpbb_ministers this morning - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/mai...0/ccjeff10.xml
Quote:
A car wreck kept propped up to save Labour votes
By Jeff Randall (Filed: 10/03/2006)
It's just as well that this Labour government is not running a company, because the business would have gone bust long ago. The likes of Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt and Alan Johnson, all of whom have inflicted their incompetence on corporate Britain via the top job at the Department of Trade and Industry, are of a commercial calibre that's barely up to working in the washroom, much less the boardroom.
The irony is that had they been accountable for their stewardship of public assets in the same rigorous and legalistic way that senior executives are on the hook for private enterprise, the DTI would possibly have sought their disqualification.
Today's report from the National Audit Office INTO phpbb_the collapse of Rover, though stopping short of condemning ministers, concludes that the £6.5m "loan" (it was really a gift) from the DTI, which sustained the company for one final, hopeless week, was a waste of resources.
"The blunt truth is there was no real prospect of selling [Rover as] a going concern and taxpayers did not get value for their money," says Edward Leigh, head of the Public Accounts Committee.
Rover was a dead dog and everybody knew it. But saving taxpayers' money was the last thing on Cabinet minds. The company ran out of petrol in the build-up to a general election, a time when Labour ministers' number one priority was securing their own political futures.
Which is why we had to endure the stomach-churning sight of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown turning up at Longbridge, under the pretence that they were there to show solidarity with shopfloor victims.
Hewittless's ostentatious demonstration of tears "for the workers" capped it all. Self-preservation has rarely been so badly concealed. It was craven vote chasing.
What the NAO doesn't detail is that had it not been for intervention by Hewittless's former colleague, Byers, when in charge at the DTI in 2000, Rover would probably still exist (as a slimmed-down producer of specialist sports cars), run by Alchemy, Jon Moulton's venture-capital firm.
This was, in effect, the deal that had been done by Rover's former owner, BMW, until a last-minute intervention from John Towers's Phoenix consortium, with implicit support from government.
Towers and his three partners are greedy chancers, yet they won Byers's backing over Moulton's Alchemy because they told the DTI and the unions precisely what they wanted to hear, ie, Rover could be saved as a mass-market manufacturer.
Not for the first time, political expediency triumphed over commercial understanding.
We now know that the outcome of Phoenix's deal was to keep Rover going long enough for Towers and his mates to take £40m of pension payments for themselves, while burning through the £400m-plus cashpile left behind by BMW.
All very embarrassing for Hewittless who, only 12 months before Rover went under, had been delighted to sing Towers's praises at the British Motor Show.
"I am very pleased with Rover's performance," she said. "There were very big risks involved in starting up Rover again when it looked as if it would be the end of the road. Company directors who take big risks and achieve big successes, deserve big rewards."
Big risks? Oh please. The Phoenix Four put in about £60,000 each. If all it takes to get your hands on a warehouse full of cash is the outlay of a few thousand quid, the heavy mob will be buying car businesses instead of robbing Securitas depots in Kent.
When it was finally over at Rover, Hewittless was desperate to make it appear as if her department had been on top of events all along, while putting as much distance as she could between herself and the Phoenix Four. Jumping the gun, she set up a press conference and told the world that the company had called in the receivers. That was wrong on two counts. Rover had at that time not yet made the phone call, and when it did so the next day, it was a court that appointed Price Waterhouse Coopers as administrators.
But hey ho, who cares whether it's the receivers, administrators or liquidators when your main priority is not saving 6,000 jobs at Rover but keeping one in the Cabinet?
Hewittless, of course, has since moved on from the wreckage of Rover and is now presiding over the financial disgrace that passes for NHS funding. It's a mess not of her making, but I'd not bet a brass zak to win a king's ransom that she'll prove capable of sorting it out.
The interview with her on BBC Radio 4's Today programme earlier this week had proper business folk reaching for the sick bucket. Her patronising performance invited only one possible conclusion: that a suburban junior school from the 1950s must be missing its deputy headmistress.
She represents nothing less than Australia's revenge on the Old Country. We transported our undesirables Down Under; in return they sent us Hewittless.
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Go on, Jeff, tell us what you really think.
But there's more to this than blood sports. UKIP will believe in smaller government. That has to mean less tolerance of waste - obviously £6.5m is more important the smaller your overall budget is.
That's why UKIP will have to hammer away at government incompetence and waste - to bang INTO phpbb_people's minds the difficult concept that government is not necessarily the best spender of their money. |
10-03-2006, 07:18 AM
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