How to waste £2.3 billion of public money

In these times of green awareness, waste management has become an increasingly fashionable issue for the public sector, always keen to find new excuses for bureaucratic intervention. The South East England Development Agency (Seeda), one of the many quangos created by Labour over the past decade, has certainly latched on to this cause in a big way. It has drawn up a ‘Waste Strategy’, set up a ‘Waste Market Development Group’, established a ‘Business Resource Efficiency and Waste Programme’, and convened ‘stakeholder workshops’ to promote ‘sustainable waste management’.

As if this frenzy were not enough, the agency also organised the grandly titled ‘Regional Waste Summit’ last year. Yet now we learn that Seeda has an even greater enthusiasm for another type of waste: the chronic, systematic waste of public money.

Documents acquired under the Freedom of Information Act by the terrier-like Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, Norman Baker — who deserves a knighthood for his ability to expose abuses in our public life — have revealed the epic scale of Seeda’s prodigality. Last year the agency’s chairman James Braithwaite spent £51,489 on taxis and ‘executive cars’, an outrageous sum that cannot be justified by any reference to his duties. A Seeda spokesman feebly claimed that the spendthrift Mr Braithwaite had to travel in subsidised luxury because ‘it enables him to make the best use of his working time’. This could hardly be less convincing. If Seeda really believed in the environmentalism it continually preaches to business, it would tell its chairman to use public transport rather than pumping additional carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

In any case, what are all these engagements for which Braithwaite has to be so expensively chauffeured? I looked through his official schedule for September and October, and could only find the predictable round of self-serving dinners and meetings, most of them with other well-rewarded public officials.