What a difference a name makes!

There's something to be said for changing your name these days. if you're a company that's in trouble you could just wind it all up and start again with a new name and be just as rubbish for example. Such a useful scam is clearly not lost on the Government when it comes to answering questions.

In written question to the Deputy prime minister for example, it is now common place to answer along the lines of "the Deputy Prime Minister's Office which was formed in may 2006 has [insert stuff here]" when responding to a question asking the Deputy Prime minister what his office has done about X since, say, 2001.

Take for example yesterday, when Mark Hoban MP asked him how much public money his Office had paid to the Smith Institute and/or SI Limited since 1997. His answer was that, "The Deputy Prime Ministers Office was formed on 5 May 2006. It has not made any payment to the Smith Institute or SI Events Ltd." Good what you can do by shifting the word "Office" from one end to the other.

If you wanted the answer to the question for real you'd have to ask the Department of Communities and Local Government which replaced ODPM. The thing is, you can almost guarantee that if the question was political dynamite they'd probably claim that the office didn't exist anymore and it would be too expensive to answer it.