Last week, the death warrant was written for the Central Office of Information (COI). And the PRCA will not mourn its passing. In fact, we are delighted. Now I know that there are some who take an opposite view – and who hold that view with passion. I respect their opinion. But I do not agree with it.

Let me explain why. The COI is one of the most bloated, arrogant, and inefficient organisations I have ever dealt with. In atmosphere, its office resembles a dole office. In culture, one of superiors handing out largesse to people who should express intense gratitude. It falls extraordinarily short of its promise of a cost-efficient organisation that brings together the best of the private and the public sectors.

That is its tragedy. The COI should have been a paragon of expertise and efficiency: delivering value for money to taxpayers, and a stream-lined process to private providers. Instead – as the government recognises – it delivered bureaucratic expense and an obsession with process, not results.

In January, we called for its fundamental reform – and if such reform could not be delivered, for its abolition. The government has chosen the latter route, and we do not blame it for that choice.

One example makes our case – the 2008 Roster review. It was, in our view, shambolic. It was also typical.

In that review, because of the COI’s failure to keep to its own timetable, agencies that had already failed to pass stage one of the process (but were unaware of that fact) were invited to complete the equally onerous second stage application process. Their submissions for the second stage were irrelevant and doubtless would have been deleted unopened, because their agencies had already been eliminated.

It was a monumental and arrogant waste of their time. Completing each stage is, after all, estimated to cost an agency a week of billable time. After lobbying from ourselves and others, the process was amended.

The charade is instructive. No agency felt able to criticise the COI in public for fear of wrecking their roster chances. Yet in private, dozens of them congratulated us, and urged us to remain firm in highlighting the COI’s intransigence.

It is up to those who defend the disappointing reality of the COI – as compared with the excellent idea it represented – to say why they do so, in the face of all the available evidence. Allow me to repudiate a few reasons why one should keep the COI:

1. It provided value for money. Not at all. It cost a very large amount of money, mostly as additional fees on top of departmental contracts.

2. It secured the best provider. Actually, it deterred many excellent agencies who were unwilling to jump through the COI’s circus hoops.

3. It was respected in Whitehall. If you believe that, then I suggest you speak direct and off-record with a few comms directors.

4. It provided joined-up government thinking. I think pretty much all of our industry knows the answer to that one.

5. It understood PR. Not at all – it was obsessed with advertising, procuring ten times as much advertising as PR spend in 09/10.

6. It provided jobs. Well, not as many as the creative jobs it stifled.

I accept that those who support the COI, do so with passion. But from the experience of the vast majority of PRCA members, the COI failed signally to live up to its promise. It failed to deliver for departments, providers or taxpayers. That is why it is being abolished. And that is why the PRCA is not sad to see the end of the COI.