Last week's damning detail on the West Coast line franchise cock-up will be music to the ears of Transport Minister Keith Brown, who in December issued a statement proclaiming the superiority of the Scottish franchise regime ("We are clearly in a better place") and tut-tutting about Westminster's "accumulation of errors caused by inadequate planning and preparation, a complex organisational structure and a weak governance and quality assurance framework".
Last week's damning detail on the West Coast line franchise cock-up will be music to the ears of Transport Minister Keith Brown, who in December issued a statement proclaiming the superiority of the Scottish franchise regime (\"We are clearly in a better place\") and tut-tutting about Westminster's \"accumulation of errors caused by inadequate planning and preparation, a complex organisational structure and a weak governance and quality assurance framework\".
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"I fully expect the DfT to be revising its internal structure and processes in the light of the report," he added, somewhat pompously.
Enquiries into this classic Whitehall farce have been seized on by the Scottish Government as a handy excuse to delay the award of the new ScotRail franchise by five months "to allow time to process the results". But cynics will note that the five-month delay moves a potentially controversial decision from just before the independence referendum to after it, a sign perhaps that Brown does not expect the next franchise deal to be a particularly attractive one from the taxpayer's point of view.
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