The cost of a bath
Mention the word "spa" in the Kostov household and the Countess will get very excited and the Count will hide all the plastic he can find. But even the Countess would struggle to spend £43 million on a spa treatment. The Government could spend £43 million sneezing. Spending £43 million on treating the Bath Spa to a revamp is a doddle for anyone in the public sector.
The Count humoured himself by reading a report from September 200o which said that the Bath Spa should be fully revamped inside two years at a cost to the local taxpayer of a mere £3 million. Ha ha ha. The total cost was meant to be about £13 million: the rest came from the lottery commission (which does an even better job at extorting money from the poor than the Kostovs ever managed from our peasants) and from some suckers in private business who wanted to clean their dirty money.
Six years later, the project has taken three times as long and has cost three times as much as the original estimate. The Spa is still not open. And the local taxpayer is shouldering 100% of the cost increase: their share has rocketed from £3 million to £30 million. There are the normal excuses: they did not realise that there might be some archealogical remains to be preserved (duh...in a Roman spa???); there were some rare frogs (the frog liberation front is all that stands between England's green and pleasant land and the rampant concrete mixer front of developers). And of course, no one is to blame. Everyone points the finger at someone else.
Yesterday the Count wrote the immutable law of government efficiency:
(Prestige project plus) government = expensive waste of money.
The Count consoles himself that the shooting season will re-open soon. Not that there should ever be on off-season for shooting bureaucrats and the good and the great who like to spend other people's money, presumably to stop us wasting our own hard earned money on pointless projects where we are unable to control the costs......
The Count humoured himself by reading a report from September 200o which said that the Bath Spa should be fully revamped inside two years at a cost to the local taxpayer of a mere £3 million. Ha ha ha. The total cost was meant to be about £13 million: the rest came from the lottery commission (which does an even better job at extorting money from the poor than the Kostovs ever managed from our peasants) and from some suckers in private business who wanted to clean their dirty money.
Six years later, the project has taken three times as long and has cost three times as much as the original estimate. The Spa is still not open. And the local taxpayer is shouldering 100% of the cost increase: their share has rocketed from £3 million to £30 million. There are the normal excuses: they did not realise that there might be some archealogical remains to be preserved (duh...in a Roman spa???); there were some rare frogs (the frog liberation front is all that stands between England's green and pleasant land and the rampant concrete mixer front of developers). And of course, no one is to blame. Everyone points the finger at someone else.
Yesterday the Count wrote the immutable law of government efficiency:
(Prestige project plus) government = expensive waste of money.
The Count consoles himself that the shooting season will re-open soon. Not that there should ever be on off-season for shooting bureaucrats and the good and the great who like to spend other people's money, presumably to stop us wasting our own hard earned money on pointless projects where we are unable to control the costs......
posted by Count Kostov at
1:08 pm
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