Conservatives could privatise Met Office
THE Met Office could be privatised by the Conservatives if the party wins the next election.
Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox yesterday said the Exeter-based weather agency, part of the Ministry of Defence (MoD), could be one of the assets sold off to raise money to equip troops in Afghanistan.
-
Met Office
Dr Fox told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show that the MoD needed to be focused on ''giving things to the front line".
Asked about cuts, he said: "We don't know what the total economic wreckage is going to look like should we win an election. I'm not very sure you can trust many of the figures given by the Government; if I shook hands with the Chancellor I'd count my fingers afterwards."
He pledged to save 25 per cent of the costs of running the MoD, but denied this would necessarily lead to widespread job cuts.
"It's also big structures like the fact that the MoD owns the Met Office, with all the costs, salaries, pensions..." he said. "I think there's a very strong case to look at the assets of the MoD and say 'do these deliver anything for the front line'."
About 1,000 people are employed by the Met Office in Exeter and the forecaster stimulates the local economy by millions of pounds per year.
The MoD has 85,000 civil servants in total. The Tories have pledged to cut overall Whitehall budgets by a third.
Last week, the Government confirmed it was looking at "the potential for alternative business models" for the state-owned weather forecaster. Junior defence minister Kevan Jones said the future of the Met Office was being examined as part of the cross-Whitehall Operational Efficiency Programme.
Comments
by David Faulkner, Ipswich
Monday, October 19 2009, 5:01PM
“In the light of the enormous challenges posed by the climate change issue this is a very bad time to consider privatising the Met Office. With human induced emissions increasing and positive feedbacks likely, it is vital that we maintain and extend the world-class facilities of Met Office¿s Hadley Centre. The outcome will affect everyone and possibly lead to extinction if the surface temperature approaches that of Venus at 480C. At present we only understand 50% of the mechanisms and 25% of the remedial action we could take to put things right for planet earth. Call a truce in Afghanistan and then increase the resources of the Met Office! We need their climate predictions to be spot-on and all mechanisms explained. Who else has the knowledge to determine what happens after jets emit H2O into the stratosphere? Why would we risk raising a family with such uncertainties about our future?”