Bob the Builder does it better!

Now Bob the Builder's a nice guy. He's always trying to help people. Could you imagine Bob on the fiddle? Not likely. But the big builders of Britain are or have been. They've been caught out rigging bids for contracts. The Office of Fair Trading has fined 103 of them the princely sum of £129.5 million. Are they sorry? Are they heck!

All involved seem to think it is something that happened and it's time to move on. The guy from the OFT this morning on the Today programme wouldn't agree with Justin Webb that they were crooks. All the spokespeople put up by the trade are just unmoved by the whole thing except to emphasise that some of those companies fined could be laying people off as a consequence. A kind of "now look what you've done" to the OFT.

I wonder sometimes what the difference is between corporate Britain and criminal Britain. If a thief was up before a judge on a thieving spree he'd done three years ago and he said to the judge, "That was then, your honour, when I stole them things, but I'm now reformed and put a stringent code of practice into place!" "How do you plead?" "Sort of guilty, sort of sorry, and it wasn't me the last time!" "I take that as a guilty plea".

It's a bit like that with the builders and the OFT!