Crossing a line

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I’ve never been a fan of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance, and I don’t understand why the media give them so much attention.  They are a self-appointed group who have decided that taxpayers’ interests are best served by opposing any and every item of government expenditure, rather than taking a balanced view about the costs relative to the benefits.

Their figures usually come from the submission of Freedom of Information requests; in this case, it was based on one submitted by a Conservative AM, whose party generally seems to share the Alliance’s ideological opposition to government expenditure of any kind.  Once they have their numbers, they then spin them into a press release which the media dutifully report, usually verbatim, as part of their daily onslaught against any type of public service in pursuit of their ideological aim of eliminating most government expenditure.

In today’s piece, they have excelled themselves.  Of course, any expenses paid to public servants need to be scrutinised (whatever Paul Flynn may say), but that is no different from the position in any private enterprise.  In the course of doing their jobs, some staff will need to travel, and there are costs associated with that.  Given the size of the undertaking, an annual expenditure of around £250,000 by the Welsh Government on staff travelling costs doesn’t immediately strike me as being excessive in total.

I certainly don’t believe that it justified the claim that these expenses are being racked up by “… a very small group of individuals intent on bleeding the public purse dry”.  I thought that was a pretty offensive statement to be making; the spokesman seems to have been carried away by his own oratory.  I’m not convinced that the slew of stories which appears regularly based on FoI requests actually adds anything to political debate; in this case, it’s just a bit of nastiness directed at people trying to do their jobs.

Revealing old news

Tweet I’m not a big fan of newspaper stories which contain the words “we can reveal” in their first sentence.  Rarely, if ever, is that which precedes or follows the words (depending on journalistic style) much of a revelation in practice.  The Western Mail has excelled itself today, however, although only the inside story seems to be on their website, not the more senstaionalist front page intro.

Their ‘revealed truth’, which is that councils can and do sell copies of the electoral register, turns out not to be ‘news’ at all.  In fact, as the quote from the WLGA spokesman confirms, this has been done since at least 1832, and maybe longer.  I would not have believed that any newspaper would present news which is at least 180 years old as such a big story if I hadn’t read it myself.  And they submitted 22 FoI requests to councils as a basis for this story.

I think that I can safely ‘reveal’, without needing to submit a single FoI request, that there has been some wastage of public money involved with these FoI requests.  I don’t expect to see that story splashed on the front page though.

Bizarre and misguided?

Tweet I'm not convinced that today's attacks by some politicians and lobbyists on the Technium programme are entirely fair or balanced. Finding the flaws in a programme after the event is always easy and makes for a good press release; it's spotting them in advance that's the hard part. Hindsight is a wonderful planning tool, I've always found. The criticisms of the Lib Dems sound particularly hollow in any event, given that, as Jaxxlanders point out, they were part of the government which launched the programme.

It can take time for a venture like this to bear fruit as well. Some of the centres seem to be doing better than others, and it would be interesting, to say the least, to see how that compares with the length of time for which they've been up and running.

There's nothing wrong in principle with the government taking an occasional risk with our money, particularly if the sums involved are comparatively small - and £5.4 million over eight years, or just under £760,000 per year, isn't what I'd call a huge sum out of the government's budget for economic development. Attacking the cost of £1,500 for a meeting which seems to have involved the managers of ten centres seemed a little gratuitous as well; it doesn't look like a hugely excessive cost to me, and it's peripheral to the core issue.

I can't agree with the suggestion made by the Tory spokesman, David Melding either, namely that support should have been focussed on developing ideas with commercial potential. In the first place, politicians and civil servants trying to second guess what does or does not have commercial potential doesn't sound like a recipe for success to me; and in the second, the nature of innovation is that a fair proportion of ideas are going to fail. If governments are going to take the risk of underwriting innovative schemes, they need to understand that some will fail; the question is whether they are getting an adequate return on the ones which succeed.

None of that means that we cannot and should not learn some lessons from the whole programme. My own feeling is that the basic idea – providing modern well-equipped premises and facilities for innovative start-ups – was a good one. I confess, though, to having wondered whether all the locations were selected for entirely the right reasons, rather than simply spreading them as widely as possible across Wales. Most importantly, was there enough liaison with universities in particular to match the locations and subjects closely enough to the academic work happening there?

We shouldn't allow a bit of political point-scoring based on an FoI request to force us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The government has announced a review anyway, as part of the ERP; we should see what that has to say before drawing premature conclusions.