Radiating Competence

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform reports that the body nominally charged with clearing up after New New Labour's commitment to clean energy has undergone budgetary problems "exacerbated by misunderstandings, unminuted meetings and lack of sufficiently trained staff". The situation as a whole shows up several rather good examples of the barriers to investment - accountability, good business practice, environmental concerns, gratuitous obligations to get the occasional sum right - which New New Labour generally likes to see removed.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's estimate of the cost of clearing up after John Hutton has risen by thirteen and a half per cent over the past year: virtually an Olympic achievement. The Authority's finance staff are to be re-trained, presumably at the taxpayer's expense. The NDA also lost a few millions by relying on "volatile commercial income"; private enterprise being more efficient than public ownership, the NDA is making good its losses by seeking more cash from the Government. The problems apparently arose from the fact that "the NDA and the Treasury were at cross purposes over some aspects of the clean-up agency's budget and decisions taken at a vital meeting as far back as February 2006 were misunderstood". Since the Treasury in February 2006 was in the famously safe hands of Gordon Brown, there is of course "no formal record of that meeting, nor was there subsequently any correspondence that confirmed what those present believed to have been agreed". Hence, fortuitously, nobody can be shown to have lied, cheated or been incompetent in the discharge of their radioactive duty. Even more fortuitously, there is money which was "meant to support low carbon and renewable technologies" - money just lying around doing nothing, in other words - which can now be used to clear up nuclear waste.