Tories

Reading the Institute for Government’s report on Universal Credit, I was struck by two related things. First of all, the project was powered forward by people who didn’t bear any responsibility for its implementation. Whenever it ran into people who needed to care about how it would work, it hit opposition. Lord Freud’s original skunkworks…

Read More Universal Credit: the history of an IT project failure

Everyone is talking about the Tory election spending thing. Apparently, there are MPs who fear they might go to jail. The latest break involves letters sent out over David Cameron’s signature, which may count against the local spending limit because they addressed the reader as living in the constituency in question. But that wasn’t the…

Read More Tory election spending and the #codgerbonds. Can you help?

Back in 2011 the government had been proposing to spend £190 million on a flood defence scheme for Leeds. Instead, they cancelled the scheme and only did £50m worth of the work. The scheme was based on a hypothetical worst-case flooding scenario. In 2011, the economic losses from such a flood were estimated at £500…

Read More Sound finance

So I got an answer to my FOI request! On the 12th of June, National Savings and Investments disclosed some e-mail regarding the Tories’ fake government mailshot. You can get the dump at the link, and read the related meta here. My original blog posts are here and here. The upshot, as usual with these…

Read More These 9 Government E-Mails I Just Got Disclosed Show Just What a Dick George Osborne Really Is

Remember that time the Conservative Party wrote to pensioners spruiking the 4% codger bonds and pretending to be an official communication from the Government? Sure ya do because I blogged it. Back then, either Rowena Mason or Patrick Wintour got the following response from a nameless “Treasury aide”, i.e. one of Osborne’s spads aka @ToryTreasury,…

Read More No, the Treasury did not “check it was FCA-compliant”