Friday, February 08, 2008

How to say "sod off" in a paragraph

Have just spotted a priceless bit of civil service bullshit in the pages of Hansard. David Willets asked the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills how many, and what percentage of the questions asked to his department were not answered due to prorogration.Good old David Lammy (for it is) said in response
The Department’s PQ tracking system is currently unable to break down the data requested and to do so would incur disproportionate cost. This Department aims to ensure that Members receive a substantive response to their named day question on the named day, and endeavours to answer ordinary written questions within a working week of being tabled. Unfortunately, this is not always possible but this Department makes every effort to achieve these time scales.
"Sod off" would have been quicker, no?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

FFS. I could do this with a copy of the Questions Book, Hansard and a pencil.

It's not a question of "sod off"; it's a question of "we can't be arsed".

Anonymous said...

That would be so easy to do.

I used to work in the Civil Service answering PQs and, you wont be surprised to hear, the first question we asked ourselves on receiving a PQ was "how can we not answer this?".

The financial threshold for a PQ is fairly high (is it £500, I can't remember) and if civil servants weren't pissing around doing nothing all day this would be very achievable.

The FOI answer threshold is even higher, so if anyone wants to put in one of those, that'll teach them, even if noone will read the answer.