Comment
Here’s Mud in your eye – again!
Some interesting points rear their head with the article on Mismanagement with Watchet Marina. As we are not Private Eye I have purposely withheld the names of the people and companies involved. Besides, the intention was to highlight the things that went wrong with the project rather than to draw attention to corruption and scandal – of which there was none – unless you count the crime of spending taxpayers money on a scheme without a coherent plan and overseen by amateurs as worthy of censure. Doomed to failure from the start.
With a selection of questionable schemes in just this little neck of the woods, I am quite concerned how the rest of the country are doing, and which other projects are under way, specified and overseen by local Government bodies, and run by Councillors with no expertise in complex project management, selecting architects and contractors on the wrong terms or the cheapest basis and submitting non-viable plans. What steps can be taken to mitigate the impact of pitting amateur buyers against professional businesses.
I am reminded, as well, about the early days of PFI. I have a Government document which outlines the reasoning behind the tendering process for a couple of projects, which quite clearly shows the jiggery-pokery that they went through to ensure that the cost of to the taxpayer if the Government ran the contract would be higher than the PFI costs – to ensure that the latter was the route chosen. We are still paying the price.
David Chadwick
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