The latest issue of Private Eye bids a fond farewell to the Metrix consortium:

So. Farewell then to the Metrix consortium and the crazily expensive plan to privatise defence training at a new academy in South Wales under a PFI contract which rose from £11bn to £14bn and was plagued by delays.

Defence secretary Liam Fox has admitted: “It is now clear that Metrix cannot deliver an affordable, commercially robust proposal within the prescribed period and it has therefore been necessary to terminate the [defence training] procurement and Metrix’s appointment as preferred bidder.”

If only Fox’s predecessors had paid more attention and heeded what the Eye has been saying for many years.  In 2006 Eye 1164 pointed out that “another crucial service is being privatised to take advantage of accounting tricks”.  And in June 2008 we exposed MoD documents already showing an “affordability gap”  and a host of internally acknowledged  reasons why the deal was a thoroughly bad idea.  But still the MoD ploughed on – simply to get the cost of the wretched academy off the government’s books under PFI’s accounting “magic”.

Right click on the image and choose view to read the full article.

6 Comments CherryPie on Oct 27th 2010

6 Responses to “Farewell to the Metrix Consortium”

  1. Altean says:

    “It is now clear that Metrix cannot deliver an affordable, commercially robust proposal within the prescribed period and it has therefore been necessary to terminate the [defence training] procurement and Metrix’s appointment as preferred bidder.”

    Difficult to see how “ANY commercially robust” proposal can be “created”, when the idea rests on covert subversion of foreign nations, to the point of regime change if needed, and constant covert intel feedback concerning those nations.

    Maybe this signals a change in national orientation away from the US model.

    Now what we need is a definitive move away from the marxist EU thought model too. Labour installed place-men are still there, as are marxist think tanks, educational models, etc.

    Time will tell.

    Thanks for the update, Cherry. :-)

    • CherryPie says:

      I have a feeling those things won’t change for the foreseeable future, the ideas are so embedded into the system. But as you say time will tell.

      One of the (many) things that particularly struck me about the consortium is that an arms dealer was involved. Wouldn’t they have a vested interest in the continuance of wars?

      • Altean says:

        Wars?

        I always understood, since this was Browns baby, (count the number of speeches where he mentioned “New World Order”) crafted after a scaled down version of “School of the Americas”, (google it) that a state of perpetual war, against an imaginary enemy created to keep the sheep in perpetual tension, was the entire ethos of Metrix and its activities….resulting ongoing, repeat arms sales would rank with always up-to-date intel, as prior students would always re-attend to be brought up-to-date on new weapons available, and be “overheard” dicussing “things”…if not indeed formal briefings!

        • CherryPie says:

          Yes that was my understanding too although I hadn’t thought about the re-attendance aspect of it before…

          The decision to place it in Wales where the infrastructure wasn’t already in place (adding to the cost of the program) was also a political decision.