Nobody has been eager to take responsibility for the fiasco over the airport on St Helena. No wonder. Completed this year at a cost of £285 million to the British taxpayer, it is unusable by commercial aircraft thanks to difficult wind conditions on the South Atlantic island. Those vagaries have been well understood for two centuries. Charles Darwin wrote about them in The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839. Somehow, ministers and civil servants were oblivious and charged ahead regardless.
At least it looked as if no one wanted to take responsibility. We report today that Sir Alan Duncan, a junior minister at the Foreign Office and formerly at the Department for International Development (DfID), has been boasting about the project as one of the great achievements of his time in office. In an interview last year with the Institute for Government, a think tank, Sir Alan said he thought that the project had gone “absolutely brilliantly”. It had been a “a success”, he said, even “an amazing project”. He added as a throw-away: “Whether there will be any planes going to the airport later is another matter.”
Any objective observer, especially a British taxpayer, would surely conclude that it was rather an important matter. Sir Alan explained that plans were drawn up by the consultancy firm Ernst & Young (now EY). Given DfID officials’ lack of experience with big infrastructure projects, he explained, he wanted advice from experts on “what constitutes a proper, fair and as far as possible, risk-free building contract”. The consultant he found was “a really, really good guy, as bright as a button”. How perplexing, then, that the outcome was so bad.
In the same interview, Sir Alan answered wisely when asked to identify the main responsibilities of a minister. “You are stewards of the nation’s money and the integrity and efficacy of its use,” he said. “You are there to explain and defend what you are doing to parliament, which is the accountability bit.” MPs on the public accounts committee, which scrutinises value for money in government, attempted to hold DfID to account for the St Helena debacle in an inquiry which concluded this week. The committee found that the airport’s construction was a “staggering” failure, but could not prise the names of those responsible from witnesses. The most senior mandarin at DfID, the permanent secretary Mark Lowcock, was asked five times who was responsible. Five times he ducked the question, claiming that different people were in charge at different times and he could not name names until the department had made its own internal inquires and sought further legal advice.
The ministerial code, a document which sets out how departments are to be run, dictates that “senior responsible owners of the government’s major projects are expected to account to parliament for the decisions and actions they have taken”. That is as true for bad decisions as it is for good ones.
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Shoddy standards of accountability incubate a culture in which failure is acceptable because it is underwritten by anonymity. That cannot be allowed to persist. Taxpayers deserve answers on who failed them and why. So do the citizens of St Helena. They were promised an airport which would boost tourism and enhance the island’s economy. So far, all their government has delivered is a colossal and very expensive foul-up.