Has Osborne's speech opened the reformist floodgates?

oldtimer

Why is it an "awkward precedent"?

Mr Osborne said in his speech that Government, like everyone else, had to tighten its belt.

Challenging - yes. Awkward - no.

John Page

Why is it awkward? The thinking seems to be that if they can identify a soft target to cut, they can cut it and offer to give the savings back. That seems fine.

Mike, Brighton

Funding by cutting spending on consultants and advertising is a good start and avoids political attack.
But its timorous. It's time for some hard truths. Much of the additional government spending is wasteful. Many public sector workers are not necessary and they will, with dignity, have to lose their jobs (they were hardly going to vote Tory anyway). BERR should be closed down immediately. A raft of quangos should be closed down immediately e.g. the British potato council, Horticultural Development Council, the Home Grown Cereals Authority, the Meat and Livestock Commission, and the Milk Development Council as an appetiser (!)
Take the money saved and cut taxes / raise the tax allowance to stimulate growth.

TGF UKIP

Don't hold your breath folks. The biggest element of spending and waste has come in public sector employment and their swollen pay and benefits. As the Tories are terrified of the public sector unions expect no serious move along the track the hares wish to go. Gimmicks yes, serious spending cuts involving personnel - no chance.

GS London

Do that many Quangoes actually exist? (!)

Can't they all be called farmers and be done with it?

C Powell

Cutting back on non-essential expenditure is what were all doing. Why the hell should government be exempt? This is exactly what should be done: identify non-essential expenditure, cut it back and either give the money saved back to the taxpayer or use it for something useful and needed. We need to get away from this idea that public spending is a good in itself: it's only good if it achieves something worthwhile as effectively as possible and this certainly doesn't apply to a very significant proportion of Labour's spending.

Alfred T Mahan

I'll believe it when I see it. For instance, in the field of adult learning disabilities, the government is pushing through a vastly expensive programme called Supported Living which actually HARMS some service users and costs the taxpayer in some cases more than double per head than the existing arrangements. The extra cost to the taxpayer is several billion - no one knows accurately because the funding is so complex it might have designed to obscure the truth. Nearly all practitioners in the field know the truth and he damage that's being done - but ask Stephen O'Brien about it (the Shadow Minister) and he says (and i quote verbatim) "this is not a party political issue". It's precisely the sort of policy that needs to be challenged and changed - but the Conservatives don't have the guts to do it. There are no votes in it, it's easy to look heartless towards the disabled even if the opposite is the case, so it's ignored even though it's expensive and harmful.

It may be an obscure area of administration, but any good costcutter knows that it's in the nooks and crannies that savings are made which cumulatively make the difference. And yet the Conservatives are doing their best to ignore it. It's pathetic.

DJ Coventry

Cutting spending on consultants is not the answer, setting proper deliverable targets for them is. It is about return on investment. Many consultants are saving the tax payer millions a year by removing waste and improving performance. Sure, some are overpaid and useless, delivering nothing but leather bound reports. The answer is get rid of the useless ones that are on useless projects. The rest can and will save money, after all, civil servants wont.

Nigel

What happened to the localism that everyone was espousing just a few weeks ago?

Ben Elford

This is a very welcome but a very modest proposal; there must be huge amounts of waste in local and national government ready for cutting.

One danger for Osborne is that councils will find excuses to cut back on the little they provide in essential services and continue unchecked with their wasteful interfering ways. I gather that our own council here is planning to issue us all with instructions on what to eat every day, in the name of 'zero waste'.

Some of us have ideas of our own on how they could cut waste.

Victoria

DJ Coventry: And how do you propose to filter the 'useless' from those that would be a good ROI, without money being wasted on the way?