From Tom Brake on Twitter:
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Recent Comments
Alan Jelfs
If we're talking a 25-year timescale than an essential part of that must be reducing the National Dept, currently costing £100billion a year to service. That ...
Jason Connor
In case you haven't heard, there is a cost of living crisis. So very high prices for food, I spent £70 on just a shop for myself the other day and not much for...- Jason Connor
Christine Jardine for next Lib Dem Leader please.... 
Phil Wainewright
Yes @Tim Rogers of course we need policies that deliver for people now. My point is that, if we don’t put those policies in the context of our longer term goa...
Christina Evans
Very sensible idea, lib dems ,labour and greens form a coalition if we get a hung parliament. Kemi Badenoch has given a nod that the Tories would go in with the...
5 Comments
Great tweet.
I want to explore this a bit more, do we know what Tom’s source is please?
I once worked for a company whose IT procurement would have made a pen pusher at the MOD dance with glee. £200 for a memory stick a few gigabytes in size and software several times the price of a commercial license and with a service charge invented by the firms IT supplier. Software not on their short list would have to go through checks that would take months.
The result? Software was bought from shops or pirated and installed ourselves onto company computers we’d disconnected from the net and reformatted with copies of windows from dubious sources. Although the computers at least had windows licenses.
I like to think the situation illustrates the problems created by excessive government taxation and regulation. Push people too far and they’ll take matters into their own hands.
Winston -what possible link is there between a company being ripped off by it’s IT supplier and Government regulation or taxation? I’m surprised you don’t claim it’s all the EU’s fault!
The central point is an obsession with ‘control’. If anyone could go the shop & buy a £1 pack of wipes anyone could do that & take them home – so runs the theory. It assumes that all employees are crooks so you have to have a ‘system’ to keep them under control. A dreadful philosophy & in my experience complete rubbish. Many years ago when I occupied the ‘God slot’ in a company that had been used to autocratic management I go so fed up with being woken up in the middle of the night to authorise a manager or foreman to use a taxi & go & buy a spanner – or something equally trivial that I gave them all a monthly budget which had to be accounted for but could be spent on anything without pre-authorisation. We worked out that if all the managers etc [there were a few hundred of them] were as bent as five bob notes the risk to the business was £x per month. There was a lot of opposition, especially from the money men. But those guys without exception were so thrilled to actually be trusted that every one of them never spent their budget,productivity went up, the company saved a fortune, & I got to sleep at nights. The people who are crooks & fiddle their expenses etc etc are those at the top & they don’t buy wipes.
@coldcomfort
Absolutely agree – I remember working for a finance director in the 80’s who saw the stationery budget was ballooning out of control, so told me to go out and buy WH Smith vouchers for all the staff – they were then told that that was their budget for stationery for the year and there would be no cupboards to dip into… the net result was that he halved the company’s expenditure on stationery.
The problem nowadays is anyone trying that nowadays would be outvoted by the bean counters.