The Sketch: When goodbye seems to be the longest word
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Your support makes all the difference.What a long goodbye it is. There are six months to go but the committee has started its farewells. They've had over a decade together and now they await the deluge. Some will be standing down, others put down. Some will be promoted, others discarded. Meanwhile, we are entering the pre-election period of nothing happening.
Ann Abraham the Parliamentary Ombudsman had come to say goodbye. Mutual admiration was exchanged. "Distinguished tenure," they told her.
"Thank you for your constructive challenge [sic]," she told them back.
Truth to tell, a little more challenge would have been welcome. When she was needled by the committee she became quite concise. How these people can talk! I'm not surprised her caseload has gone down from nearly 1,700 a year to 400.
Not that it had, really, she explained. It was due to the fact that "our methodology and terminology had changed now to show those figures are comparable. What was termed an investigation then is now termed an intervention." That was worth waiting up for.
It starts to answer one question: Why does everything take so damned long? The Ombudsoffice has been taking a year to get round to dealing with half their complaints. Next year they'll be dealing with 90 per cent of complaints in that time. That sounded a great improvement until Tony Wright gently remarked that a year was still an awfully long time.
The procedures, the processes, the consultations, the regional conferences, interim reports and reviews all have their share of the blame. But I bet the way these professionals talk has more to do with it than anything else. It's hard to catch the flavour of it without filling the space up with popcorn.
But Ms Abraham is a Heroine of Parliament. She produced the Equitable Life report. She wrote unequivocally that maladministration and injustice had caused the loss of many people's life savings. The Government was unwilling to shoulder the £4bn cost of compensation and produced a cheaper scheme to help the hardest hit. What did they make of all that?
There was a lot of popcorn from Ms Abraham. But when the committee constructively challenged her she said the Government was within its rights.
Before this admission, she had caused Charles Walker excitement with her controversial [sic] remarks that Parliament needed more control over the Government. It was her "quaint and old-fashioned view" she said. Ah yes, everyone nodded with a melancholy solidarity. The good old days when free-thinking parliamentarians over-rode the Government.
It is one of the pieties of the time – but it's not in the DNA of Government or shadow Government to give away power. Less quaint keening, more constructive challenge and short, declarative sentences – they're what's needed. It's an impossible dream.
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