Defra Mugs
I'm indebted to my old chum Nigel Joice for emailing me to inform me of just some of the ways Defra has chosen to waste money during 2009. Five hundred quid on t-shirts I suppose isn't a huge amount, although three grand on promotional pens might be a tad OTT. They've also blown a similar amount on mugs, topped off with over six grand on travel wallets.
Travel wallets? Well, at least that's a saving on the thirteen grand they spent on them in 2006.
All I can say is that that particular salesman must have had a nice little earner out of that lot.
"Your brother is in reception looking for a signature for those 175,000 pencils that you ordered, Mr Benn."
If ever a government department typified where public spending could be slashed without it making one noticeable jot of difference to the quality of life for your average Joe on the street then this is surely it.
This is the shower of muppets remember who shelled out GBP180,000 revamping their website because the old one was "too brown" - a colour that they said was "too associated with farming"!
Who can forget the plasma telly's, laptops, and mobile phones that went missing? That lot read like a stock take at Curry's. Or the GBP350,000 on taxi's?
Even that pales into insignificance compared to the more than GBP1m was spent on removal contracts over three years, or the thick end of GBP5 million blown on empty office space every year.
They can easily top that lot though with the GBP26 million expended on recently failed IT projects.
I wonder if they'd be interested in any Defra monogrammed dog turds? They are mostly available in brown I grant you (you simply don't see the white stuff any more do you?), but I reckon with a few tweaks to Nogger's dog's diet we could possible come up with a range of subtle pastel shades to suit most tastes.
Travel wallets? Well, at least that's a saving on the thirteen grand they spent on them in 2006.
All I can say is that that particular salesman must have had a nice little earner out of that lot.
"Your brother is in reception looking for a signature for those 175,000 pencils that you ordered, Mr Benn."
If ever a government department typified where public spending could be slashed without it making one noticeable jot of difference to the quality of life for your average Joe on the street then this is surely it.
This is the shower of muppets remember who shelled out GBP180,000 revamping their website because the old one was "too brown" - a colour that they said was "too associated with farming"!
Who can forget the plasma telly's, laptops, and mobile phones that went missing? That lot read like a stock take at Curry's. Or the GBP350,000 on taxi's?
Even that pales into insignificance compared to the more than GBP1m was spent on removal contracts over three years, or the thick end of GBP5 million blown on empty office space every year.
They can easily top that lot though with the GBP26 million expended on recently failed IT projects.
I wonder if they'd be interested in any Defra monogrammed dog turds? They are mostly available in brown I grant you (you simply don't see the white stuff any more do you?), but I reckon with a few tweaks to Nogger's dog's diet we could possible come up with a range of subtle pastel shades to suit most tastes.