The Public Accounts Committee will continue to investigate what is happening, and will ultimately produce a report, which I expect will be quite hard hitting. It's a cross party committee chaired by Labour's Margaret Hodge MP, who has shown herself willing to ask difficult questions when they are justified.
My view is that there's failure on both sides. As I explained
in a recent post, the competitive tendering process tends to result in contract awards to one of a handful of large suspects, with the price beaten down so low that the contractors can't find people to do the work at the price they're prepared to pay.
Ultimately, no politician wants to be left holding the blame. These large Government tenders provide massive benefits for the politicians - they get the work done cheaply, they have someone else to blame for the problems, and they don't have to employ people directly to do the work. The Government often seems unwilling to impose penalties on the contractors or take legal action for breach of contract, probably because the contracts are so beneficial to ministers. This leads to a cosy cartel of failure, with minister's positions approximately being "we all know it's not working, but we're so happy at the cheap price and that we are not directly to blame that we'll leave it to you to sort out so long as you're happy for us to blame you in public".