Friday 19 November 2010

Lost jobs and trivia

Unpredictability often appears to be second nature to the Lib Dems, but even so, this one managed to surprise me.
I’m not going to try and argue that the Techniums have been a roaring success; that would be silly.  But judging their success or failure on a comparison of their cost and the income generated is a very curious way of looking at them.  There is a cost to generating jobs; there are risks involved in start-up businesses of the type that they were supposed to help.
So, the issue for me is not whether they made a loss or not; but what they achieved for the money expended.  It was an experiment, and may have been replicated too far too fast, but an element of risk-taking is essential if we want to move forward.  Those issues seem to be  matters in which the Lib Dems have no interest – presumably because it would make for a complex story rather than a quick headline.
Either way, to ‘welcome’ a decision which is likely to lead to a number of job losses seems to be rather perverse.  And harping on about a £1500 cost for bringing 10 people from all over Wales together for a meeting looks like elevating trivia over substance.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

THE WDA were planning to get rid of what they had 10 years ago. They were going to hand them over to Local Authorities as multi-purpose centres. Then when there was no enthusiasm for that , they thought the private sector can have them and we will subsidise them for 5 years
Then all went quiet and lo and behold they built more
Where the change of plans came from would be good to know