How to blow £13 million

The Count can think of plenty of ways to blow £13 million. Unfortunately, the Countess can think of even more ways of blowing £13 million and does so at great cost to what remains of the family silver, so carefully looted over the laast few hundred years by the Kostov clan in the name of Mother Russia.

But aristocratic waste is nothing compared to what the government can achieve. To them, blowing £13 million is as inconsequential as blowing their nose. They do not need to blow their noses anyway. They need to clean thier noses to make them less brown. But that misses the point. The point is that it is in the small things that the greatest waste is achieved. Like the time the Count was sent to work in a tax office. Officially, this was work experience. Unofficially it was to get hold of the Kostov tax returns and destroy them. But in this so called work, the young Kostov discovered that he was doing something which was

1. 100% pointless: sending out tax notifications on codings which everyone knew would be changed three weeks later by the spring budget
2. 100% inefficient: it could have been done by computer in a few moments, but had to be done by the young Kostov hand over ten weeks
3. 60% even more inefficient, because even by hand the work could be done in four weeks, not ten weeks: but ten weeks was the alloted time and because the bureaucrats did not want to lost their budget for the following year, the young Kostov was retained for the full ten weeks. This gave him plenty of time to help out with the filing in the office, to locate the Kostov tax returns and secure the Kostov inheritance from the rapacious hands of the taxpayer for another generation.

All this still misses the point. The count has been drinking too much vodka, and it is not even lunchtime yet. Drink is what happens to people when they start thinking about the taxman.

So let's see how the government can blow £13 million without even trying. They set up a programme to recruit teachers. Because they have no imagination, they have no idea how to do it. So they try to bribe graduates into becoming teachers. But because they wet their pants at the thought of the Unions demanding equal treatment for all teachers, they can not even bribe the graduates well: they bung them a laptop computer and digital camera. If even the dullest graduate can not figure out that it is not worth blowing their career for a digital camera, then they should not become a teacher.

That's a triple negative. Award yourself a medal if you could understand it. The Count is in a generous mood today.

Then the dimwits figure that since they have a lousy proposition, the way to make it work is to spend a fortune on advertising it. £13 million later, they had managed to con 140 of the dimmer graduates into joining their scheme. That is about £100,000 per graduate just to recruit them, let alone train them or pay them. For £100,000 they could have put together a real bribe. Even the Count would consider stepping into a school for a day or two for a cool £100,000.

We will now see how the government's scheme was wasting 99% of its budget by comparing it with a private charitable scheme, called Teach First. Teach First could not offer any bribes at all. And to make matters more interesting, it was putting teachers into challenging schools, which have traditionally served as feeders to Her Majesty's Prisons in much the same way as Eton is a feeder school for Oxford, Cambridge and Parliament. It would be better if Eton fed the prisons and the challenging schools fed Parlaiment, but that is another matter.

Teach First had no money but plenty of imagination. Within three years it had recruited over 500 top teachers and had received government support totalling £200,000, or roughly £400 per teacher.

Government recruiting cost per top(ish) teacher: £100,000. Private sector cost per top top teacher: £400. Government waste: 99.6%. People whine about aristocratic waste because it is visible. But the far bigger waste are all the useless bureaucrats who save money on paper clips at the same time as they blow millions and billions on employing themselves to administer utterly useless programmes in the most inefficient way possible.

This is all so depressing, the Count is going to have to open another bottle of Vodka or two.