THERE was an inevitability about it at the end.

So hapless Coperforma is to throw up the contract to supply non-emergency ambulance services in Sussex after a litany of failure.

In truth no one comes out of this very well. The lead commissioning care group certainly not, for it seemed unable to control the forces it had unleashed when it handed Coperforma the contract and certainly seemed dozy when The Argus was showing week in week out what it should have realised itself. Namely that the service was never going to improve.

Meanwhile the watchdog which is supposed to work on our behalf to ensure services are delivered in the proper manner, the Care Quality Commission, has several question marks against its effectiveness.

To not really know whether Coperforma’s subcontracted ambulance company had the proper licence to operate was unforgiveable.

But there is a wider picture here and it is the Government that must answer for this folly.

To introduce mad cap “inner market” principles is bad enough but to refuse to oil the system with enough cash probably meant the contract was doomed from the start.

Coperforma took on the job, maybe looking for a toehold in the wider cash pool that is NHS contracting, at a price which made failure a strong favourite.

It is not just the main players in Sussex who continue to have questions to answer over the Coperforma scandal but the politicians in London who over the years have foisted a labyrinthine system on the NHS which is simply not fit for purpose.