About turn

It must be a nightmare when you spend weeks making a current-affairs programme only to find that days before it’s broadcast the subject you’ve been exploring is turned upside-down. That’s what happened to Radio Four’s Inside Money, the sister programme to the excellent Money Box, almost a fortnight ago (Saturday, repeated Monday last week). The producers had put together a programme about the government’s ludicrous Home Information Packs, the HIPs, that are due to come into force next June, only for the crucial home inspections paid for by the vendors to be scrapped overnight as unworkable. We all knew that but at least this hopeless Labour government woke up to it in the nick of time.

So what did Inside Money do? The interviews had been done, the programme already put together. Well, they ran the original programme but topped and tailed it with the latest government decision. Quite what listeners made of it — hearing details of much of a plan that no longer existed — I don’t know, but Inside Money had little choice. At least we could hear for ourselves the impracticalities of this Alice-in-Wonderland scheme, something promoted enthusiastically by the then junior minister Nick Raynsford, though whether it was his idea or that of his former boss John Prescott I have no way of knowing. It has the marks of the buffoon Prescott all over it. Still, it gave the ridiculous Raynsford something to do, I suppose. Anyway, the more I listened to this programme the more insane the original scheme sounded.

The programme took a listener, Niall Connolly, to do the interviews. As it happened, he was in principle in favour of the HIPs, having made an original Inside Money programme about reforming the house-buying process.