Margaret Hodge: interpreting contract a “fiasco”

Last June the British government introduced plans to shake up Whitehall with the aim of making the civil service smaller, less bureaucratic, faster and more accountable.

Yesterday senior mandarins reported to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on progress to date. However, PAC Chair Margaret Hodge MP expressed concern that within the Civil Service failure frequently went unpunished, stating:

“The mood out there is all too often people in the Civil Service don’t get held to account for performance and may get rewarded for failure; and most recently we saw the Home Affairs Select Committee report on UKBA where the head of UKBA – and this is no [sic] personal; it’s not for me to judge, but just hearing what Home Affairs Select Committee did – the head of UKBA was found more than wanting and they expressed surprise that she’d then been given the stewardship of HMRC. Now for the public that doesn’t establish great confidence.

Margaret Hodge later listed some of the more spectacular failures in Whitehall’s record of contracting out public services:

I remember the West Coast main line; that was a fiasco. I remember the MoJ interpreters’ contract; that was a fiasco in the MoJ. I’m afraid the DWP – you may think they’re improving – we think that the way they’ve handled the contracts on the Work Programme has been less than satisfactory.

For the benefit of Ministry of Justice mandarins and Capita Translation & Interpreting, the dictionary definition of a fiasco is “a complete failure, especially one that is ignominious or humiliating“. 🙂

Hat tip: Geoffrey Buckingham