LabourDoNotDo.com

www.dumb-idea.co.uk

A leader in this morning's Times is entitled www.dumb-idea.co.uk.  I saw it last night when a first edition of the newspaper arrived at 18 Doughty Street.  The leader is about the new Clarke-Milburn website but I thought that The Times had, perhaps, put together a spoof website of some sort with the dumb-idea.org.uk domain name so I entered the URL into my browser.   On discovering that The Times hadn't even bought the name I did so - figuring that many people might do as I did...

So welcome to this site that's been running for a few months - LabourDoNotDo.com.  It's dedicated to spotlighting Labour incompetence.  Messrs Clarke and Milburn might particularly enjoy this section - it's dedicated to the incompetences of Gordon Brown.

Vulnerable at risk after Home Office fails to track those who have offended abroad

BBC: "British criminals may have been cleared to work with vulnerable people in the UK after committing serious crimes abroad, police chiefs have said."

The Sun Says: "When is someone going to carry the can at the Home Office.  Jails are in crisis. Murderers walk out of prison at will. Nobody keeps count of illegal immigrants.  Now we learn hundreds of rapists, murderers and child sex perverts convicted abroad have disappeared.  Their files were left in a box instead of being of entered into the Police National Computer.  Some paedophiles may already have jobs involving children.  It beggars belief — not that such outrages are taking place — we are used to that.  The incredible thing is, not one senior Home Office chief has publicly paid the price for gross professional negligence."

'We don't know how many prisoners are on the run'

BBC: "The director general of the Prison Service has admitted that he does not know exactly how many inmates are on the run from open jails."

Enough is enough: "The Evening Standard has published an astonishing story today under the banner headline "Wanted Pictures of Escaped Killers Breach Their Human Rights". Derbyshire Police have revealed that THIRTEEN inmates have absconded from Sudbury open prison in the last TWO months. Yes, that's right - that is roughly one prisoner absconding from this one open prison every 5 days. Only two of them have been recaptured."

Home Office underestimates failed asylum seekers living in Britain by 150,000

BBC: "Ministers are set to admit they may have significantly underestimated the number of failed asylum seekers living in Britain... Last year the National Audit Office estimated that the figure could be as much as 283,000 - but at the time the Home Office insisted that was too high.  Now a trawl of files in the Immigration and Nationality department has produced between 400,000 and 450,000 case files... Home Office sources say that because of poor record keeping, officials are unable to calculate the exact number of failed asylum seekers, but the figure is far higher than previous estimates."

Useless and costly home seller packs

Daily Mail leader, 12th July 2006: "The idea behind the Home Information Pack was essentially sound.  It is daft and frustrating that six buyers, interested in the same property, have to commission six separate surveys.  How much better it would be if sellers paid for one survey for all would-be buyers.

There was only one possible drawback: if the HIP was overpriced, potential sellers might be discouraged from putting their homes on the market.  That could cause problems for the economy all round.  But the pluses of the scheme seemed to outweight the minuses.  That was before the Government got its fumbling, bumbling hands on it.

Now we have the worst of all worlds: a HIP that will be fantastically expensive for vendors at £1,000 - and totally useless to buyers, who will still have to commission separate surveys of their own.  Buyers have two main concerns: is the property likely to subside, and is the wiring sound?  Yet, quite incredibly, these vital facts will be left out of the HIP, masterminded by - who else? - John Prescott...

Why is it that every good idea turns to dust in this inept Government's hands?"

More here from The Mail and Download PDF of the Conservative Party's home_information_pack_campaign briefing.

ID cards project set to fail

"The Government’s controversial identity card scheme is in jeopardy, with Whitehall officials accusing ministers of ignoring reality, according to leaked e-mails.  Officials are openly questioning whether the scheme can be tested and delivered by 2008 as promised... David Foord, the ID card project director at the Office of Government Commerce, says: "This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date rather than reality.” He doubts that the cards can by delivered in two years. “I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail.” - The Times

The mishandling of Foot and Mouth

The Guardian: "An EU report into the way the foot and mouth crisis was handled today condemned the government for traumatising farmers and breaking animal welfare laws.  A draft document drawn up by a European parliament temporary committee of inquiry, blamed excessive bureaucracy for adding to farmers' woes and delaying the disposal of slaughtered animals... Caroline Lucas, the inquiry's vice president and a Green party MEP for south-east England, said: "The report is a damning indictment of the way the government responded to the crisis.  The British government opposed the inquiry, just as it opposed any public inquiry into the outbreak at a domestic level, but I hope it will listen and learn." (1 October 2002)

Nothing seems to work anymore

The Business of 4th June 2006: "Nothing seems to work anymore; the economy is losing its competitive edge; educational standards are slumping; violent criminals are on the loose; the underclass continues to grow; immigration is out of control; and the culture is coarsened by a prevailing yobbery. Yet the most well-resourced government in British history – in terms of manpower and treasure – has proved to be useless in the face of such challenges – and sometimes worse than useless...

Incompetence has become the hallmark of everything the Blair government touches. Consider just the last seven days...

• we learned that the Department of Health is braced for a £13bn overrun on an IT project which was supposed to cost £6.5bn;
• the Department of Work and Pensions is granting National Insurance numbers to illegal immigrants while its bureaucrats give official instructions on how to defraud their own system;
• Mr Brown’s disastrous tax credit system made a further £1.8bn in overpayments last year (the third consecutive year the system has massively malfunctioned);
• and it was revealed that more than 50% of pupils leave school without a basic competence in mathematics and English (even though spending on state schools has doubled).
• Meanwhile, over at the Home Office, the department which grants one-legged Romanians work visas as roofers and releases foreign criminals tagged for deportation onto the country’s streets, a chief immigration officer is taped demanding sexual favours from an 18-year-old Zimbabwean asylum seeker while another official fills in an immigrant’s “citizenship test” in return for cash – the sort of corrupt madness usually associated with the bureaucracy of a collapsed former Soviet state rather than one of the richest countries in the world."

Farmers facing ruin over farm payments chaos

BBC Online: "Farming Minister Lord Rooker has said he is sorry for distress caused to farmers in England by delays in paying millions of pounds in EU subsidies.  The problems were caused by the new Single Farm Payment, which was introduced to simplify the system.  Farmers now get an annual cheque, in place of subsidies on individual sales.  Around half of the £1.5bn earmarked for the scheme was sent out several months late, and thousands of farmers have still not received their payments." (20th May 2006)

£11.23 to track every letter from an MP to the Home Office

According to figures released by the Home Office on 3rd April 2006, it cost £11.23 to track each letter received from MPs and the public round the Home Office.  More.