Subverting democratic oversight

One of the basic rules of Westminster democracy is that the government - and through it, the civil service - are accountable to Parliament, particularly on how they spend public money. However, that no longer seems to be true in the UK. The Independent today reports on a particularly egregious case in which UK civil servants responsible for the UK's nuclear industry systematically plotted to evade democratic oversight of a dodgy deal they were stitching up with private contractors - and succeeded.

Last year - ostensibly for reasons of "public safety" - the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority outsourced management of the Sellafield nuclear plant (the UK's most polluted and dangerous nuclear site) to a multinational consortium. The consortium would be paid 22 billion pounds for this, but that wasn't enough for them - in a typical PPP stitch-up, they demanded that the government fully indemnify them for the costs of any nuclear accident, and threatened to walk away from the deal if they didn't get their profit risk-free. The NDA readily agreed. But there was a problem:

Normally, as the documents repeatedly acknowledge, the Government would place a special minute before Parliament if it intended to undertake a liability of more than £250,000. MPs would then have 14 days to raise an objection, which would stop the undertaking going ahead until it had been dealt with.

Or maybe not...

But MPs were not told about the Sellafield indemnity until 75 days after the last moment when they could object, even though it potentially exposes the taxpayer to liabilities running into billions.

The energy minister Mike O'Brien blames a "clerical oversight" for this. But the documents clearly show that the senior civil servants and nuclear administrators had been actively discussing how to limit MPs' chance to object at least since early last year.

In the UK, it seems, democracy is just a barrier that civil servants work around in their pursuit of "smooth" government.

Heads should roll for this - not just because of the potential financial cost, but because these "public servants" have forgotten who they work for. And that simply cannot be tolerated in a democratic society. As for the management contract, the UK Parliament should simply repudiate it - it didn't follow the necessary rules, therefore its not binding. Otherwise, they're simply setting themselves up for similar betrayals by the public service in future.