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21 September 2011 1:26 PM
Why was Prescott allowed to waste so much of our money?
There used to be a bus lane on the M4 approach to London, until last December someone sensibly got rid of it.
The £1.9m scheme was opened in 2001 at the behest of then then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who had been placed in charge of the government's integrated transport policy and had pledged to reduce the number of cars on Britain's roads.
The introduction of the lane did nothing of the sort, only serving to inflict misery on thousands of commuters who saw their journey times increased as the number of lanes were narrowed in order to placate Prescott's vanity. I remember once being late for a friend's birthday and spent the best part of two hours crawling along that stretch of road, thinking then that if for some strange reason Prescott was at the party it would be very hard to refrain from marching across the room and thumping him.
I thought of the money wasted on that ridiculous lane this morning as the Public Accounts Committee described the FiReControl plan, Lord Prescott's dream of creating a network of regional fire stations, as one of the most disastrous projects it had ever seen.
When the project was launched in 2004, it was forecast to cost £72million and take four years to complete. Seven years on, it has ended up costing £500m and ended in 'complete failure.'
Half a billion pounds! This all has eerie echoes of another of Prezza's wheezes whilst he oversaw the department for Communities and Local government, New Labour's disastrous Pathfinder scheme, where £2bn was wasted on needlessly demolishing thousands of structurally sound homes as part of a renewal scheme in the Midlands and the North of England.
Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts committee at the time, damningly concluded in 2007 that the Housing Market Renewal scheme had been a total waste of public money. He said:
"This is a disastrous piece of social engineering in which £2.2 billion has been spent and 10,000 homes demolished that should have been refurbished. And there is no evidence that anything has been achieved in terms of higher house prices or quality of life for the communities involved. We have wasted more than £2 billion for nothing. Given its performance to date, it is hard to think of another programme which was trumpeted with such a fanfare, but which has hit so many wrong notes."
Now of course sitting pretty in the House of lords with his £1.5m pension pot, Prescott embodies the stereotypical socialist who enjoys nothing more than spending taxpayers' cash on pointless projects. But, as the cliche goes, the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money.
Who allowed him to preside unchecked over such waste and incompetence during this time?
The blame must undoubtedly lie at Tony Blair's doorstep, who for years allowed his deputy to flit from department to department, wasting hoards of our cash. Blair's reasons for doing so are spelled out in his memoirs.
'What did John bring to the party? A lot actually. When John smith died and the issue arose as to who should be deputy – it being reasonably clear I was going to win the leadership – the safe bet was certainly Margaret Beckett. She had been part of the pre-1992 economic team; she was capably and undoubtedly a safe pair of hands. John could not be described as that; but he bought that authenticity, an appeal to the party's traditional wing, especially within the union movement, and he had something else I valued greatly: in a tight spot, I thought you could count on him. You couldn't necessarily count on him in terms of individual policy items, or more generally in terms of New Labour, but, on the basis of the tiger-shooting analogy (would you venture into the jungle with this person/) he passed muster.
In other words, he was Blair's hired thug. A bruiser, installed as Deputy Prime Minister solely to protect Blair from left wing elements of his party who were suspicious of his conservative leanings.
I don't know about you, but that to me smacks of weakness and moral cowardice. It is a weak leader who in return for protection from his own party, allows a baffoon to indulge in hair-brained follies.
Like spending £2m on the bloody bus lane which used to exist on the M4 approach to London, until last December someone sensibly, thank God, got rid of it.
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