A report by the UK government watchdog, the National Audit Office, into the collapse of Rover and the support provided by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), concludes that the affair has cost UK tax payers around £275m.
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The costs include £129m provided by the government in 2000-2005 to the Rover Task Force, designed to help suppliers based in the West Midlands reduce their dependence on Rover. An estimated £146m will have been spent on statutory redundancy claims, retraining and grants and loans to former suppliers, since the collapse of the company last year.
Other costs will include, for example writing off a loan made by the Department to the administrator to keep the Company going in its first week of administration (£5.2 million), and a proportion of the outstanding tax liabilities.
The report is critical of loans supplied by the DTI to help keep the going so it could be sold as a going concern, which was probably an unrealistic expectation. It concludes that it is “doubtful whether these benefits and the remote prospect of a going concern sale presented the DTI with sufficiently good value for the loan.”
According to Reuters, SAIC had pulled out of negotiations to buy the company
The report notes that agencies on the ground did well to meet demand for re-employment and retraining services. By early January 2006, 58% of those people who had registered as unemployed were in jobs.
