Conundrum

Product Description

Governments do not provide value for your money. In fact they spend taxpayers' money wastefully & even stupidly. The UK government spends an unfathomable GBP660 billion every year
- that's GBP11 000 per every person in the country plus a further GBP13 000 each of accumulated debt. Although public spending is being curtailed total government spending is still rising
- it is only the rate of growth that is being slowed by cuts. In Conundrum Daily Telegraph Senior Political Correspondent Christopher Hope & Richard Bacon MP who sits on the Public Accounts Committee that examines the accounts of government departments look at a wide variety of cases where hundreds of millions & even billions of pounds of taxpayers' money were spent on projects & programmes that went wrong & where individual members of the public suffered as a result. Throughout the book the authors look at examples of failure which illustrate the problems facing governments trying to make things happen. They look at why massive & expensive public computer systems tend to fail universally; how ministers are expected to set the direction for government but are barely around long enough to warm their seats; why the civil servants who are supposed to deliver public policy are hamstrung by risk-averse behaviour; & finally Conundrum examines what can be done to improve things & asks why none of the many attempts to reform the system over the last fifty years have worked.