...they never would be missed...

Over the week-end two more more emerged, although they had been expected.

One was a quango. For some time it has been apparent that the Standards Board, a product of Prescott lack of thinking, has been a terrible waste of time. Worse, - it has seen considerable injustice - vendettas by controlling groups against nuisance councillors, gagging councillors who have worked hardion an issue, councillors who had uncovered inconvenient hidden truths, and so on.

Now comes some evidence that the Board also spends millions of pounds wastefully in pursuing cases that were the product of spite or ignorance. On the "Dizzy Thinks" website the poster has calculated that between 2004 and 2008 the Board spent over £21 million in investigating 2,937 complaints. The vast majority, or 2,344 were found to be spurious or baseless. So if spending were roughly the same on all cases on the average, something like £16 million was spent on these spurious ones.

The second case also involves the ridiculous. Over the week end The Sunday Telegraph reported
that a secret Government report into HIPs (Home Information Packs) had been withheld. HIPs which cost a house seller about £600 have been condemned by buyers as generally useless. This finding was produced by the commissioned research.

It seems that estate agents condemn the reports, and buyers largely mistrust them and ignore them. Apart from all the committee time in drawing up the bills to put an act on the statute book, and nearly a million pounds in advertising the scheme, the result is a scheme which nobody wants and which nobody finds useful.

So why does the Government persevere? Well there is a "nice little earner", - a £200 fine for everybody who tries to sell a house without having assembled the pack, and there is an army of assessors trying to make a living from it. The largest single reason that Government pride is at stake when they are erecting a flimsy veneer of competence. The word "Sorry", and "We made a mistake" do not exist in the vocabulary of this Government, unless they are apologising for something done by Britons at least 150 years before.