Bureaucratic cock-ups cause so much avoidable pain

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Hitting “reply all” on an email intended for one confidant. Doing an “Ed Balls” and accidentally revealing your innate vanity on social media. Absent-mindedly putting the name of the victim of a vindictive office message in the “send to” box.

In a different category, the financial world has, in recent times, become used to extraordinarily large, market-crashing deals being put through because a trader accidentally put an extra couple of zeros on the order. Still, such embarrassments are as nothing to the consequences of bureaucratic fat-finger syndrome.

In an exclusive for this paper, we discovered that the Home Office botched its police reforms because an official accidentally opened the wrong Excel spreadsheet. Thus it was that the Metropolitan Police was to be faced with a cut in funding of some £184m rather than the “real” figure – a much more manageable £3m. Even more distressingly, perhaps, thousands of divorced couples may have to go back to court and relive their unhappy split because another set of officials left a software glitch in the program that calculates separation settlements and the valuation of assets.

The nation has long had to deal with the consequences of bureaucratic incompetence. Some systems, such as the DVLC and Post Office Telephones, simply ceased to function in the 1970s. The inadequacies of HMRC have been all too well chronicled – not least the propensity of tax inspectors to leave computer disks on trains – and the NHS IT system was the greatest waste of public money in history. The military is in a class of its own for appalling blunders.

Yet the age of the internet gives our bumbling rulers wider and instantly irrevocable opportunities for damage. These episodes provide further support for the suspicion that an awful lot of awful things happen because of cock-up rather than conspiracy.