Is the British Civil Service Totally Incompetent?

John Reid, the former home secretary, has already told us that the Home Office is not fit for purpose.

Well the recent fiasco with HM Customs and Revenue losing vital data on nearly half the population of the country started us thinking.

Then we are told just a couple of weeks later that some moron in the Driver and Vehicle Driving Agency in Northern Ireland has lost data on 7,685 vehicles and 6,000 vehicle keepers.

Oh No! It’s not finished yet. Just as we are thinking that it cannot get any worse, we are told another disc containing details of 3 million learner drivers has gone missing. Even worse the data was stored in a foreign country. And to show what complete incompetents this government, their ministers and the civil service really are the latest episode we are told happened six months ago.

Now for sheer cheek and hypocrisy, the Government has fined Norwich Union £1.6M for losing the data of 74 people.

That works out at approximately £21,621 per person.So using the Government figures of 25Million from HM Revenue, and 3,013,685 from the DVLA, then the Data Protection registrar should be fining this Government £605,683,883,385.

No minister has lost his or her job, and apart from the HM Revenue guy who resigned, no civil servant has been fired. Everyone we speak to is running for cover, no one is taking responsibility, and it is fair to say that competence is not something we can have much expectation of from our public servants.

We, the public, pay the wages of these people. We pay good money and should reasonably expect workers who are honest and competent. Should we find that these two attributes are missing, then I’m afraid that there really is no place in public service for those lacking these attributes.

Does any member of the public really believe that no one has received a peerage or a Knighthood for donations to any of the major political parties?

No authority without responsibility should be the rule.

Every project, every policy would have a responsible person and if there is a screw-up then we will immediately know who to look to for the answers.

Lunatics running the asylum are bad enough but we really can’t have them running the country as well.