Thursday, January 25, 2007

Bums on seats are important I guess!

When Margaret Beckett took over at the newly formed Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2001, it's spending budget for furniture (British made no less), was £634,715.24p.

When she left the Department to go to Foreign and "oh f*ck" Commonwealth Office, the spend on British made furniture she had managed to triple the budget to £1,800,549.93. In the year that young David Miliband has been there, he's managed to increase it by £63,354.85.

Now I'm not for a minute passing judgement on this you understand. After all, we are facing an obesity crisis in Britian and it's quite possible that this has caused a large increase in broken chairs within DEFRA. What's more I don't know whether this figure covers the cost of mirrors during Margaret Beckett's tenure.

I imagine the farmers waiting for their payments will be pleased to know that DEFRA is doing it's bit to support the British furniture industry though.

Update: I've just been reminded of by an anoymous poster about this incident in Newcastle at the DEFRA office that was meant to do the farm payemtns. Perhaps some of the furniture went there after they trashed it? Shame on me for not remembering this incident!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dizzy, I am a little surprised at your ignorance here, to be honest.

Do you not recall the fiasco at the Rural Payments Agency ['responsible' for handling the 'Single Farm Payment'].

The youngsters there [somewhere near Newcastle? ] were using the chairs to play 'human skittles' on or somesuch...don't recall the exact details, but some were stripping off, and the story got into the press - much to the chagrin of the senior management at said agency. Will try and track the details down...

dizzy said...

You know what I do remember that actually now you mention it.

Anonymous said...

Dizzy, sorry the only reference I can track down is via a Jamaican news story

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/html/20061230T130000-0500_117225_OBS_APPRECIATING_THE_JOB_YOU_HAVE_.asp

Curly said...

Memory lapses can be seriously upsetting at times. I thought that Miliband and myself had the incident well covered in June last year.