Skills quango "wasted" £100m

David Willetts, the shadow education secretary, has revealed through a number of parlimentary questions that the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) - one of the government's biggest education quangos - has "wasted" more than £100m on staff redundancies and on several internal re-organisations.

  • LSC was created five years ago and has carried out three re-organisations so far with the fourth one planned for later this year;
  • LSC has spent almost £55m on making its staff redundant (since 2001);
  • £61.9 spent in the year before LSC launch winding up its predecessor, the national network of Training and Enterprise Councils, bringing the total bill to more than £116 million since 2000.

 From the Telegraph

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Comments

The really breathtaking aspect of that report was the explanation by the spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills, that the LSC budget is "well over £11bn" and that the money wasted therefore "represents less than half of one per cent of the total". When the Government thinks that £100 million is small change whose wastage is insignificant, they are managing too much of our money. Imagine what that £100 million could have done if left in taxpayers' hands. They would have been very much less careless about how they spent it.