Keltruck’s Chairman & MD, Chris Kelly, has written to The Birmingham Post regarding wasteful spending of public money.
QUANGOS
Dear Editor, Would you believe it, one un-elected quango criticising the work of another.
I refer of course to the amusing report by Paul Dale (Economic Masterplan is ‘unclear and indecisive, Post July 23) and also your editorial on The West Midlands Regional Assembly’s response to Advantage West Midlands’ Regional Economic Strategy, after a year-long draft study into how this region can close a “guestimated” £10 billion productivity gap between the West Midlands and the rest of the UK.
I just loved the bit where the WMRA says the report should highlight ways of preventing villages from becoming the “domain of rich car-owning commuting people”.
Are they so thick that they do not realise these are the very wealth creators we so desperately need, and don’t thank God that we have got so many in the region. They must accept we should be doing everything possible to keep the ones we have, not knocking them for goodness sake.
I went along to the first of AWM’s consultative meetings in Wolverhampton. The room was full of quangoists, and so very few business folk. I was aghast there was such little interest from AWM’s presentation in our failing transport infrastructure, without which, how on Earth vast amounts of new investment is expected I know not.
You will not find in the report any mention of the fact that these two organisations sap well over £400 million of local taxpayers’ money, dreaming-up schemes they can then both fall out over.
But I can give them one suggestion, and without the need to employ an army of consultants either. Let companies like mine keep more of the hundreds of thousands of pounds that we pay each year in corporation tax; we would then provide even more new and “sustainable” jobs (to use a word that they like) than any of these bureaucrats can ever dream up.
CHRIS KELLY
