What is a "Vanity project"


I was quite annoyed at the county council meeting with one Lib/Dem councillor who described a number of projects to improve education in Cumbria which had been listed by my colleague Councillor Ben Shirley as "vanity projects."

I would add that the first project he had listed had been the £20 million grant to the Cumbria Education Trust which has just taken over Whitehaven Academy to provide that school (formerly known as Whitehaven School) with new school buildings. )

Generations of staff, parents and former students at that school would almost certainly agree that this school has been in desperate need of new buildings for not just years but decades - both Labour and Conservative councillors also said the same during the meeting - and that whatever a vanity project is, that one is needed.

The history of politics is listed with measures for which the title of "vanity project" is indeed appropriate - airports which only a handful of flights depart from, bridges that nobody crosses, plans for sports stadiums which, if they get built at all, are nearly always empty, magazines published at the taxpayers' expense which nobody reads.

Another councillors who spoke in the debate referred to the splitting up of the education budget into too many small separate budgets and there is definitely something in that argument. The problem goes back at least to the Blair years - New Labour provided more money for education but it came in more than sixty different funding streams each with a bureaucracy to manage it.

However, I did get the impression that there was a little bit too much of a tendency to dismiss as a vanity project something done by a rival party or level of government. Both the government and Cumbria County Council have recently launched initiatives to help children's mental health. Eve if you think one or both could be improved, does it make sense to praise the one and dismiss the other as a "vanity project?"

It's a bit like another entry for the "Irregular verbs" often cited by the character Bernard Woolley in "Yes, Prime Minister" - in this case
  • "I support vital community prorammes
  • You waste money on vanity projects
  • He siphons cash into pork-barrel schemes."

 

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