As more details emerge of the fiasco over the recent awarding of a rail franchise, it’s very difficult not to roll your eyes at government incompetence. But beyond the arguments about who is to blame and if the debate between nationalisation or privatisation there are deeper issues about the techniques and methods by which these big complex decisions are made.

Firstly, that complexity is your enemy. You will get lost in the labyrinth of paperwork and tortuous projections. Simpler processes are as likely to give you as good a result as a complex one, yet be better controlled. The knack is to judge the balance between too simple and too complex.

It now appears the root cause is a faulty spreadsheet [1]. It has long been a bone of contention that big spreadsheets are in-fact programming projects and need a programmer and programming skills. A programmer would have created tests to ensure the calculations were accurate, something clearly the civil service bean-counters never did. And finally this is an excellent example of why being open with data and decision making is an advantage - a faulty spreadsheet would have been seen much quicker along with any flaws and bias in the processes and might have actually helped the bidding operators make better and more realistic bids. The bureaucratic instinct for complexity and secrecy has just cost Britain £40M (and counting).

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/oct/05/west-coast-civil-servant-transport