West Coast Mainline
The scrapping of the West Coast Mainline franchise award goes to the heart of the Civil Service’s credibility and reputation for competence. At a time when relations between some ministers and some senior civil servants are already strained, the disclosures could hardly be more damaging. In many respects, this is more serious than the furore of five years ago when the apparently inadvertent loss of computer discs with child benefit records led to the resignation of Paul Gray as head of HMRC.