Safe In Their Hands

A report by the Commons health committee claims that the remains of the National Health Service are failing to give due care and attention to keeping track of their expenses. Specifically, despite the roaring success of so many Whitehall database systems, there are no central records detailing the amounts spent on managament consultants. The National Health Service, which under the provisions of the Private Finance Initiative is maturing into a large bureaucratic machine for taking money away from taxpayers and giving it to the directors and shareholders of private corporations in return for defaulting on their contracts, spent three hundred million on management consultants last year, and perhaps double that in 2005-2006. The honourable members of the Commons health committee are worried that the management consultants may not be giving value for money; which appears to imply (no doubt inadvertently) that value for money is something you can get out of a management consultant.