By Democrat editor Bill Heaney
How rotten are our politics both north and south of the Border when the lid comes off scandals such as this one that was revealed at the weekend?
The SNP have awarded a £545,000 contract to help design its controversial National Care Service – that’s the one nobody apart from the Nationalists wants to see happen – to consultancy firm KPMG despite it being fined £13 million over misconduct by a UK financial watchdog.
The secretive SNP Government – inheritors of Sturgeon’s Secret Scotland, which West Dunbartonshire Council’s Labour and SNP groups have slavishly embraced and implemented here – has lost yet another secrecy battle.
And it has been and been forced to reveal that it handed this contract to a company it knew was “dishonest.”
The SNP Executive in Holyrood has been accused of riding “roughshod” over its own advice to waste even more cash as one expensive blunder after another makes its weary way to Holyrood before becoming an expensive disaster that has been hushed up.
According to the Herald, ably assisted by Nick Kempe, a regular columnist in The Dumbarton Democrat, especially over big issues such as the Flamingo Land planning application for Balloch, accounting giant KPMG was awarded a £halfmillion deal to help develop National Care Service in December 2021.
It was tasked with designing the Target Operating Model to give a “high-level view” of how the reforms would work, despite the fact that everyone and his granny – apart from the SNP government – was against it.
The Cabinet Office even threatened to ban the firm from bidding for public sector contracts but on December 13, 2021, the Scottish Government awarded KPMG the National Care Service contract.
Four days after this announcement, the company took the unusual step of withdrawing from bidding for any more contracts.
Now, however, it has been revealed that SNP Ministers were warned by the UK Government that KPMG was “dishonest” but ignored this advice and still went ahead with the deal.
They spent more than two years trying to keep this a secret but were collared by the Scottish Information Commissioner and told to release the information.
In addition, the minutes from the meeting added that there was “grave professional misconduct” which was “grounds for exclusion” from public sector tenders.
It concluded: “Process has been kicked off with KPMG with regards to this. We don’t have to exclude them and every contracting authority can make their own decision.
“This was not just a scandalous misuse of public funds, it suggests that the real intentions behind the Scottish Government’s proposals for a National Care Service were always deeply cynical, driven by the private sector rather than the public interest.”
This has a familiar ring to it, especially in regard to the noise around Flamingo Land.
Dumbarton MSP and Scottish Labour health spokeswoman, Dame Jackie Baillie, said: “This astonishing revelation raises serious questions for the SNP government.
“It appears the SNP rode roughshod over the advice it was given in order to hand over hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money to a consultancy firm.
“This secretive and incompetent SNP government is incapable of delivering the National Care Service Scotland needs.”
KPMG declined to comment, much in the same way as West Dunbartonshire Council when it is asked to answer questions about matters which turn out to be controversial.
That’s nothing, they spent £600,000 as just one payment we know of, for the review of the mental health act which wasn’t even proof red.(sic)