The late US President Ronald Reagan once said that the most terrible words that a person could hear were these: ‘I’m from the Government and I’m here to help’. He said this because government has a very bad record of providing the sort of help that people really need at the time that they need it.

Britain, or rather Boris Johnson’s Tory Government has recently produced a classic example of how a government scheme failed to achieve its basic objective. Not only that but this failed scheme managed to waste millions of pounds of taxpayers money in the process.

The scheme in question, to install heat pumps into houses in order to replace gas boilers managed to fall very far short of the number of homes that was supposed to convert and also clocked up a massive £1,000 ‘administration cost’ for each home converted. The scheme has been abandoned but not before this badly organised and monitored endeavour cost the taxpayer millions of pounds.

Guido Fawkes said:

Boris’s green industrial revolution is hardly off to a flying start. It’s been revealed that the government’s green homes grant scheme – which cost £314 million to install heat pumps and solar panels – has fallen dramatically short of its targets, upgrading just over 47,000 houses out of the 600,000 as planned, and somehow flushing away £50 million of taxpayers’ cash on admin alone. Probably explaining why the whole scheme was scrapped after just 6 months.

According to the Public Accounts Committee, the “poorly designed” and riddled with inefficiencies scheme, with roughly £1000 spent per home exclusively on administration costs, and massively underdelivering on the promised job opportunities:

Less then ten per cent of the potential houses have been converted and £50 million wasted in the process for heating systems that have been widely mocked for their inefficiency and for the cost of the electricity that it needs to run them. Also as many have expected when hearing of these various ‘green schemes’, there has been no rise in employment connected to them but there was an enormous amount of waste. How on earth can such a scheme manage to rack up £1,000 in admin costs per home is beyond me? Is this just general state inefficiency or has someone or some organisation been unjustly trousering money that has been poorly accounted for in a very poorly designed scheme?

What an absolute and disgraceful waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere.