The UK Civil Service vs Tesco!
Today saw two announcements. The first was Tesco revealing annual profits of £2.25 billion. The second was the Commons Public Accounts Committee predicting that HM Customs and Excise had overpaid claimants of income support by £2.2 billion ... for the second year running!
Tesco is a huge and complex organisation – its meteoric growth would have been impossible without a world-class IT and logistics system in support. Its world-wide supply chain delivers highly perishable goods at the right time, in the right quantities, to the right locations, week in and week out.
In contrast, HM Customs' IT system (provided by EDS) is clearly incapable of delivering one product – cash – in the right quantity, to the right recipient, at the right time.
In one year, a single government department has managed to ‘misplace’ as much as one of the UK’s largest companies has managed to earn. What is going on? How can incompetence on this scale be possible, let alone defended?
