Motability provides an 'excellent service'. Remember that amid the furore over bonuses at the disabled car charity

How many other public sector linked organisations could that be said of. Carillion? Capita? Network Rail? No? The scheme has issues to address but it doesn't deserves its whipping boy status

“Provides an excellent service to eligible people… successfully changed its business model over time, bringing aspects of the service, such as insurance, directly into the business.

“The management… turned the scheme around and built it into an increasingly profitable business and a force to be reckoned with…”

Now have a guess which public sector linked organisation the National Audit Office (NAO) said that of. Carillon? Capita? How about Network Rail? No?

It was actually written about the Motability Scheme, that provides vehicles, motorised wheelchairs and scooters disabled people. These frequently serve as a lifeline.

Here is what an amputee friend of mine said: “Look, without the car, I just wouldn’t be able to work. That’s what really matters to me.”

By now you’ll probably be aware that the central conclusion of the NAO's report into the scheme has been utterly swamped by the furore surrounding the £2m ‘secret’ bonus paid to Mike Betts, the boss of Motability Operations. It is the commercial outfit that is linked to the charitable scheme. It provides the vehicles.

I’m not going to defend either the bonus or the £1.7m package he was on. Nor will I defend the sums handed to his management colleagues. I have consistently criticised excessive executive largesse in this column, and I will do so again. The payments were too high. The people who agreed them were guilty of the sort of muddled thinking that bedeviles both the public and private sectors and has become a major cause of social division.

Yes Motability is a de facto monopoly, enjoys important tax breaks, has arguably made too much profit, built up too high reserves.

But when he departs following his resignation, Betts will leave the scheme in a better situation than when he joined it. He and his colleagues have done the sort of job we aren’t generally accustomed to seeing anywhere in either the public sector, or in the parts of the economy that are linked to it and depend on it.

Just read that opening paragraph again.

There are things that need to be addressed. The report raises governance issues as well as pay. They extend to the Motability charity, which, it has emerged, had little influence over the payments.

But the thing I would be most critical of as regards the scheme isn’t actually mentioned by the NAO. It is the way its leaders have, through this affair, provided its enemies with another stick with which to beat it.

Motability seems to have become a convenient whipping boy for the government, and for MPs, whenever they find themselves under an uncomfortable spotlight. And my how they are under the spotlight right now.

Picture the conversation between a minister and his press man in some draughty Whitehall corridor: “Look, we’re taking a lot of heat right now. How about someone drops a line to one of our friends in the tabloids about that scheme providing free cars for disabled people. Have them dig up someone who isn’t really disabled driving a Merc or something. That’ll draw attention away from our latest cock up. Can I leave it to you to fix that up?”

This isn’t conspiracy theorising. It’s par for the course in Whitehall and Westminster. It's the shabby way they do business. Perhaps we should get the NAO to take a look.

Again, compare Motability’s performance to other parts of the public sector that ministers oversee, to the shenanigans that go on there, and the dismal service that is provided. Consider what’s been happening, say, on the railways.

Britain does a pretty poor job by its disabled people, exacerbated by a Government for which the term ‘callous’ is almost an understatement. Its treatment of the community was savaged by a UN report last year.

Motability, by contrast, stands as something of a success story. It gets disabled people moving in a nation that seems to be designed to prevent that, facilitates them getting to work, stops them from rotting in chilly flats.

As a concept it’s a wonderful thing, something that, as a nation, we ought to be quietly proud of.

The issues raised by the NAO surely need to be dealt with.

But at the same time, we shouldn’t forget that first paragraph.