Friday, 9 July 2010

All responses seem to be woolly

Presumably, the reason for the continuing woolliness of answers in the House is that it is the same civil servants who write them. But one would hope that occasionally Ministers would look at them and point out that what is supposed to be a response is nothing of the kind, even to relatively non-contentious questions.

Lord Pearson put down a Written Question on what must be a relatively non-contentious issue though the lack of clear response makes one wonder what is being hidden:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the value for money of their funding of £1.5 million to the Sarsen Housing Association in Cornwall for 20 affordable homes.
The response was a little odd in that it stated the obvious without replying to the question:
Grant funding to Sarsen Housing Association to provide 20 affordable homes was provided through the Home and Communities Agency's (HCA) National Affordable Housing Programme.

Funding was made available through a competitive bidding basis where bids were assessed against four main criteria, value for money-in terms of total public subsidy per home and per person housed, design and quality standards, deliverability and local and regional priorities.
So what assessment has been made?
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4 comments:

  1. Derek Tipp9 July 2010 at 16:22

    To be honest, this is a typical reply. No doubt the minister has no idea and has never heard of this scheme, so only the blandest of replies is possible. I guess that a much more direct question would be needed if you wish to expose some flaw in the process, such as the scheme representing very poor value for money, etc. One has to ask - can the Minister really be up to speed about every small housing scheme?

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  2. Admin9 July 2010 at 20:01

    The Minister does not write the replies, the civil servants do and they have time to find out what is going on. The problem is that these replies do not answer the questions but give a resume of how the money is allocated, which is irrelevant to the question. The funny thing is that when such non-replies elicit more questions, civil servants complain bitterly about having to write answers to more and more questions.

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  3. Derek Tipp10 July 2010 at 17:49

    "what assessment they have made of the value for money of their funding of £1.5 million to the Sarsen Housing Association in Cornwall for 20 affordable homes."

    Does the government make an assessment of the value for money of each scheme, I wonder? I assume you have asked the question because you know of some deficiency in the scheme and I wonder if you might get a more specific response if you had mentioned it?

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  4. Anonymous10 July 2010 at 20:15

    "EU BUREAUCRATS came under fire last night for secretly spending £400million of taxpayers’ money on “confidential” projects".
    Hi-diddle diddle at the EU

    ReplyDelete

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