On Tuesday (21st May), Parliament broke up for its traditional Whitsun holiday. The MPs and Lords are due to reconvene on Monday 3rd June when around a 1000 legislators will be back at their desks ready to challenge the Government on its actions and judgements. However just because the MPs are in their constituencies doesn’t mean that the Whitehall based Civil Servants have a holiday. On Friday at 5pm, at the end of a hard working day, a Government Department known as the Major Projects Authority (MPA) published a series of important reports. At the same time Francis Maude was making a statement explaining that when he came into government, there was “a relaxed approach to managing projects worth hundreds of billions of pounds” with problems “swept under the carpet where they festered at the taxpayers’ expense”.

According to the Minister the MPA led by David Pitchford has already saved all of us £1.7bn so it is something of a surprise that these reports have not received more of a fanfare. We know when the Government is trumpeting its news, they usually choose a morning early in the week when there are plenty of people available for John Humphreys et al to interview. To wait until the end of the business day on the Friday of a Bank Holiday weekend, at the beginning of half term presents a huge risk that this news will get missed and be forgotten by the time the Commons returns to work. Almost as though a ‘bury the bad news’ carpet had opened up in front of Mr Pitchford despite the words from his boss.

According to an article by the BBC and a piece in the Independent these reports focus on 191 substantial projects with a total value of 350Bn and it categorises them in terms of their likliehood of success. As the graph shows, a mere 17% of these high profile, costly projects are highly likely to succeed. At best 45% are likely or probable to succeed.

Amongst the projects where success is judged to be unachievable are those two aircraft carriers which we hear so much about and the refranchising of the West Coast mainline railway along with a new passport application system. Also a new computer system for the MOJ and some new drone aircraft for the MOD. The schemes where success is merely ‘in doubt’ include the Universal Credit, Personal Independent Payment and the Benefit cap all of which are part of Iain Duncan Smith’s department as well as another transport scheme, the HS2 line.

Perhaps when the MPs return from their holidays they could pay a bit of attention to the 83% of the schemes which are not highly likely to succeed. A bloke called Pareto once suggested that we risk throwing 80% of our effort at 20% of the work leaving the majority of it almost to chance. Based on the MPA report it appears that our Government have done exactly that.