Government waste

Stephen Pollard notes this shocker from an economically illiterate "political researcher" at University College, London:

Overseas aid charities have dismissed an academic's suggestion that donors should be able to bypass third sector groups and give money directly to the Department for International Development .

Meg Russell, a political researcher at UCL, made the suggestion in an article in Fabian Review, a left-wing think tank publication.

"I would rather trust DfID with my money," Russell wrote. "Because DfID doesn't operate in the same competitive environment, there is less danger of waste."

What, the government waste our money? Perish the thought:

Patrick Watt, policy co-ordinator at ActionAid, said the idea "didn't bear close scrutiny" and that DfID had higher administration costs than the NGOs it funds.

"When people donate to development NGOs, they're wanting us to do something different to the UK government," he said. "We are able to innovate and take risks."

Meanwhile, Peter Hoskin provides more evidence of our government's failure to make good use of public money:

On Tuesday it was tax credits. And now the Public Accounts Committee delivers a boot to another of Gordon Brown's pet projects - the New Deal. The findings should (but won't?) put pay to those claims that the UK's achieved "full employment". Some six million people now live in homes where "no-one has a job and 'benefits are a way of life'". Put another way: one-in-six households are now benefit dependent.

And then there are the pots and pots of taxpayers' cash that have been used to reach this unedifying position. Those households cost some £12.7 billion a year in public money. One New Deal scheme found jobs for only 61 people in a year, at a cost of £1,100 each.

And we won't even talk about the NHS, or local government, or state education, pen-pushing police officers, MPs "employing" their offspring to do nothing...

On the other hand, unlike some charities we could mention, at least the Department for International Development is not in the habit of posting millions of biros to people who are quite capable of buying their own. But perhaps the idea just hasn't occurred to them yet.