Why hire nurses when you can win awards?

My column in the magazine last week was about a PR outfit called Awards Intelligence which helps companies and individuals win various pointless vanity awards — everything from business awards up to OBEs and knighthoods. I asked them if they’d help me get a knighthood, because I’m worth it. Yep, they said, that’ll be £3,900 plus VAT please. Oddly, despite the piece being published last Thursday, they’re still importuning me to call them and fix up the knighthood, so I’m not sure to what the ‘Intelligence’ part of their name refers.

I suppose if private companies and individuals feel a pressing need to win these sorts of fatuous awards, it’s up to them. It tells you more than you need to know about all those self-aggrandising industry certificates, as well as the biddable nature of the Queen’s honours lists. But public sector companies using this firm for themselves is surely an egregious waste of our money. On their website, Awards Intelligence cite both Durham NHS and Fife Council as having ‘worked’ with them recently. I tried to find out how much Durham NHS had spent but was told to file a FOI request – so I made some cheap crack in the mag about being able to reveal the result in November 2014. I got that wrong, the FOI query was answered over the weekend. It transpires that Durham NHS spent more than £17,000 with Awards Intelligence in an attempt to win some award. That’s almost exactly the amount a trainee nurse would earn in a year up in Durham. I wonder how many other public sector industries are wasting our money like this.