THERE has been great anger at the £400,000 payout from public funds to the former directors of the company which failed so miserably to build the Edinburgh tram system.

And rightly so. It is completely unfair that individuals from Trams Initiative Edinburgh should be trousering sums in excess of £80k while other failures in the public sector go unrewarded.

How about the civil servants who were involved in the Scottish Parliament building project and who oversaw the budget rising from £50 million to £414m?

Shouldn't they have got a piece of the action, a small percentage of what may be called the vigorish.

On a lesser scale but very high in the league table of ineptitude, consider the folk in the South Lanarkshire Council finance department who were duped by an online invoice and sent £102,000 to some fraudsters in Nigeria.

Did they get a wee bonus at the end of the month?

How about those officials at Argyll and Bute council who banned nine-year-old pupil Martha Payne from blogging photos of her school dinners and then issued a press release trying to justify the censorship (which they later reversed).

Such monumental municipal mismanagement should be recognised. If not financially, then at least in some small way in the next honours list.

In a fair society, rewards for failure should trickle down to all levels of the workforce. Bonuses for unemptied bins.

Special payments for headmasters of schools where weans leave with fewest qualifications. And maybe the worst school dinners.

There should also be rewards for success. I hope whoever is running the Glasgow and Edinburgh bus lane fines departments is getting a kick-back from the many thousands of pounds the councils are raking in. Time, too, that parking wardens got a bounty on each ticket issued.