Is Clegg’s bright idea another satire from the makers of Twenty Twelve?

Could there be a more vivid cautionary tale for Vince Cable and others who yearn for interventionist industrial policies than the Commons Public Accounts Committee’s report on the failures of the Regional Growth Fund? This £1.4 billion bundle of largesse was created in April last year at the instigation of Nick Clegg and as a sop to those who regretted the axing of Labour’s regional development agencies. It boasted a board chaired by Lord Heseltine and including Lords Storey, Shipley and Monks. Never heard of ’em? They are, respectively, the former heads of Liverpool and Newcastle city councils and the TUC, so ideally qualified to act as Dragon’s Den judges overseeing the selection of promising companies to back on behalf of the taxpayer — alongside, among others, the deputy chairman of G4S, the outsourcing company that so spectacularly failed to meet its Olympic commitments. The only sensible name on the list was the venture capitalist Jon Moulton, who must have wondered whether he had been cast in a savage new satire from the makers of Twenty Twelve.

It turns out the Fund has channelled just £60 million towards promising businesses so far, creating just 2,440 jobs and ‘safeguarding’ 2,760 more — against a target of 36,800, which Clegg claimed would be multiplied many times over by ‘private-sector leverage’. This model quango has no doubt also kept in work most of the army of second-rate ‘consultants’ who used to leech their living from RDA budgets. Meanwhile, the private sector as a whole has managed to create more than half a million new jobs during the Fund’s existence, without its help and despite the burden of employment law that Cable is so reluctant to reform.

We have heard this week several sermons on the lessons of the London Olympics. Undaunted by the Regional Growth Fund embarrassment, Cable apparently wants to surround future business winners with state-funded advisers just as athletes are surrounded by coaches — great news for all those consultants.