28/1/2007

Home Office/Jubilee River similarities

Have you noticed the similarities between the Home Office and the Environment Agency? To his credit, Home Office Minister John Reid has publicly confessed that his department is ‘not fit for purpose’. Unfortunately he was the very last person to admit to failings that have been blatantly obvious for decades to anybody not in the Cabinet. Surely a fundamentally flawed culture where the employees are rewarded with jobs-for-life and inflation proof pensions needs more than Ministerial tinkering? If that is the case, then just ‘splitting’ the Home Office cannot be the solution to his problem!

So is it not time for David Miliband to take control of the Environment Agency, or is the Department now so big and powerful that they are unmanageable? In 2003 Environment Minister Elliot Morley told the House of Commons that there was no evidence that, by operating their newly built Jubilee River, the Environment Agency had exacerbated Thames flooding. Hence in the absence of evidence at the time, the flood victims were denied a Public Inquiry!

Elliot Morley has gone, there is a new Minister, and the evidence is now available. Briefly, the EA spent £110m of public money building a flood alleviation scheme that fell apart on first use, was demonstrably harmful to downstream villages and has cost nearly £4m to repair. The EA received £2.75m in an out-of-court settlement with the designers, but the Jubilee River is still unable to carry its design capacity. The original cost/benefit calculations used to justify the scheme have not been achieved, and to make matters worse thousands of households living in flood risk areas have now been hit by huge rises in insurance costs with still more to come!


Bearing in mind that incompetence and negligence resulted in injustice, may I suggest that neither the Jubilee River nor the Environment Agency are ‘fit for purpose’?


Ewan Larcombe