What would you cut?

Jonathan T

Public sector pay freeze and immediately close all public sector final salary schemes to new entrants.

Admittedly provocative, but public sector workers should share the pain of reduced tax payments / receipts.

Tom

Trident - obviously.

James Strachan

Regional Development Agencies.
Most of the DFES functions.
The NHS centralised IT system.

liz Brown

End absolutely ALL government IT projects - all are a total fiasco and already way over budget and not one will do the job required of them. Quangoes, five a days and NHS Managment, Speshul advisors should also go. Withdraw from Yurop For further tips read Daniel Craig's "Squandered

Graeme Stewart

Bring the civil servant pension system into line with reality. All civil servants make a contribution of 3% of their monthly salary. Adjust the retirment age to 65 for those 45year or younger and make them pay the same NI as the rest of us. Doesn't save a lot of money immediately but the savings in the long run are enormous and it removes a major unjustness in the countries pension arrangements.
Cull the non-jobs eg. real nappy co-ordinators.
Simplify the tax system then reduce the overheads in the tax collection system At the moment 25-30% of the income tax collected is spent on administring it.
There billions there for the saving and I have only just started but I would spend more on Defense.

Nicholas

Levy a punitive tax on councils for each and every local government job description that cannot be justified by a cost benefit case setting out the direct public services it delivers. With a special one-off windfall tax on any job description containing the words "co-ordinator", "diversity" or "smokefree".

JR

Right I'm working off this - http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2008/09/12/13.09.08.Public.spending.pdf

Scrap the office for the third sector - not because the social enterprises, charities and public interest companies shouldn't be be encuraged, on the contary, instead I would bolster the sector by introducing a new "public value" not lowest bid meeting minimum standards procurement strategy across Government.

In the benefits sphere I would freeze increases (look for a 2% real reduction) in Disability Living Allowance in advance of a comprehensive review. This would be hugely unpopular with the middle classes but there we go.

I'd pull out of Iraq and freeze the defense budget (whilst prioritising a smaller armed forces, better trained and with better rehabilitation services).

Finally I'd set a 5% real terms cut in the Communities and Local Government sphere with the Secretary of State tasked with implimenting it.

Looking at the what historically happens in recessions I'd increase funding to allow an increase a significant increase in Jobseekers Allowance for those with good work records. I'd also increase ringfenced funding for mental health services and I'd have 5% increases in the money to museums and the arts.

I'd probably consider freezing as suggested budget for education for a year to see what happened.

Secretarys of State would be tasked with making cuts in other areas - the PM has to offer political cover - that is generally the problem in central government when cuts are considered, downing street goes wobbly.

James

We could cut Parliament - it seems an extravagant waste of taxpayers money; along with the 3 devolved governments!

james allen

my god, cameron needs to move osbourne. The US shows that as the economy tanks people want to blame the current Government. And of course in the UK's case, they would be very right to do so. But the Tories can't capitalise on this open goal while their economic spokesman (and the guy supposed to be preparing to run the system) is not trusted by the public. Osbourne's credibility has been smashed by the yachtgate affair and needs to be replaced by a big beast like Ken Clarke (or maybe William Hague). God help us if we get another 5 years of Brown.

Roger Davies

Introduce an Efficiency Audit right across the Public Sector with the objective of shedding around 500,000 unnecessary jobs and reducing Council Taxation by 5% PA per year for the next 5 years in real terms. Cancel all unnecessary Gov. projects such as ID Cards and National Data Base. Increase income tax thresholds immediately and treble the heating allowance for OAPs.
It is too early to address "The Brown Burden", but once the economy returns to growth a plan for it's reduction over around 20 years must be implemented.

Kevyn Bodman

Stop ID cards and the database State.
And don't be timid about saying it and doing it.

What is this 'In a recession, most British people could live without identity cards'?
We can live without identity cards at ALL times.
I know that Conservative policy is opposed to ID cards, but they don't make nearly enough noise about it.
Say it loud, no ID cards, no database State, keep us free and save billions too.

There are plenty of other areas to cut too; I'll read the comments with interest.

Bruce, UK

Public Pension Liabilities. Not a short term solution but Mr Brown,the Prime Mendacitor, always claims to be taking the right long term solutions. I would start with about 650 high profile public sector staff working at a metropolitan site.

Rob C

Contribution to the EU - £10-15bn plus additional savings from reduction of bureaucracy!

Short the UK

There will be plenty to cut:

Tally-ho:

Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Icelanders will take to the streets in their thousands tomorrow to protest the government's failure to clinch a $6 billion International Monetary Fund-led loan while countries in less dire economic straits jump the IMF queue.

Weekly protests in downtown Reykjavik may swell to 20,000 soon, or 6 percent of the population, said Andres Magnusson, chief executive of the Icelandic Federation of Trade and Services. The islanders are venting their anger on politicians as prices soar, the krona collapses and the economy goes into reverse.

``Enormous mistakes were made, but those who made them are still in the same place,'' said Hildigunnur Runarsdottir, a music composer who has attended five protests since the country's banking system collapsed last month. ``They don't seem to be doing anything at all about the situation.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=asLaQvoKH9Ec&refer=home

Chris Horne

Good article...here's my list...
MP's expenses.
MP's junkets abroad.
All quangoes.
Regional assemblies.
Government advertising.
NHS monster-computer-project.
ID card scheme.
Health & safety Executive (maybe already binned under "Quangoes"!).
5-a-day coordinators, teenage pregnancy coordinators etc etc.
Our entire subscription to the EU.
Simplify/flatten taxes as much as possible and get rid of most of the tax officials.
Phew...I could go on all day.

Neil Turner

Cut Government advertising on Radio and TV. No idea how much this is, but every second ad on TalkSport is NewLab telling us how to run our lives, pay our taxes, drive safely.

Patrick

Public sector recruitment and pay freeze.
IT projects.
RDAs.
Limit all public sector salaries to a mximum of 150k - politicians included.
Dismiss the entire army of Health and Safety, outreach co-ordinators etc.

Travis Bickle

BBC Tellytax
Rapid rebuttal unit
All of Dame Suzi's quangoes
Scrap ID Cards
Stop paying millions out to the big consultancies for stating the bleedin obvious.
Simplify the tax system and scrap tax credits (with it's bureaucratic overhead and waste)

and most importantly

leave the EUSSR.

albert son of a gypsy.

Have an Immediate BAN of public service recruitment. Have a cabinet committee, no less, to look at all requests for any recruitment.

Reduce the BBC Licence Tax by, at least, 50% which would be both popular and make the BBC pay reduced salaries and thus slim down their operation and management.

Those on long term Unemployment / Sickness benefits to be medically examined and if fit and within the age group recruit them into the armed services, without appeal!

Those elderly people unable to work be given FOOD VOUCHERS and not money!

Get prisoners to build the new prisons! Real work learning new skills etc!

All local Tourist Information and National Tourism quango's etc. IF they are necessary someone in the private sector will taken them over!

Social Services should become part of the NHS immediately. That would provide a no barrier organisation and reduce management costs.

Tax all caravans the same as a motor vehicles (THAT is just to get at Mrs Beckett!)

albert son of a gypsy.

Have an Immediate BAN of public service recruitment. Have a cabinet committee, no less, to look at all requests for any recruitment.

Reduce the BBC Licence Tax by, at least, 50% which would be both popular and make the BBC pay reduced salaries and thus slim down their operation and management.

Those on long term Unemployment / Sickness benefits to be medically examined and if fit and within the age group recruit them into the armed services, without appeal!

Those elderly people unable to work be given FOOD VOUCHERS and not money!

Get prisoners to build the new prisons! Real work learning new skills etc!

All local Tourist Information and National Tourism quango's etc. IF they are necessary someone in the private sector will taken them over!

Social Services should become part of the NHS immediately. That would provide a no barrier organisation and reduce management costs.

Tax all caravans the same as a motor vehicles (THAT is just to get at Mrs Beckett!)

Aless Bieri

Can we impose a windfall tax on eyebrow dye?

Hereford

Nicolas: one addition to coordinator etc... ...strategy.

Once saw a job title in a local government department of Litter Strategy Coordination Officer. Honestly, a true job description on a cinema advert.

Wily Trout

Abandon 'Contactpoint'

Nick

6.3%. That's the pay rise the unemployed are going to get.

2% for nurses.

Why? Well a lot of benefits are linked to the Rossi Index. Capping that at the level of nurses pay deals with that.

Long term, its state pensions.

1. Stop accruing any more pensions.

2. State employees future pensions become defined contributions.

That means they need to get the stock market and economy working, or no pensions.

3. They get a choice. Contributions in pay or contributions to a fund.

Now, lots will want the cash now. Think about a strike ballot. It's divide and conquer. If you vote for a strike, you don't get the cash. Subtle.

The secondary effect, you can get to make a direct comparison of salaries private versus public. Again illuminating.

Advertising of public sector jobs. All adverts should go online via something like jobserve. The data should be in the public domain with a reuse clause.

So if the Guardian wants to continue advertising, they can. They get the data for free. The government and councils don't pay for the adverts.

Also, its a gate keeper. Since you're going to implement a freeze on jobs, and they all go via one portal, you can control what goes on.

Axe the DTI

Axe quangos such as the potatoe council...

Axe Vehicle excise duty and add a couple of p to fuel.

Quit the EU and remain the the EUFTA

Perry

Change the way budgets are allocated.

Every expenditure must be accounted for, rather than simply justifying the increase on last year's budget.

Reign in the BBC and slash the licence fee. Do they really need 8 channels to themselves and shares in a number of others? Do they really need so many local radio stations? They are the reason independent commercial radio stations are dying out.

Abandon the consultation culture in local and national Government. All too often a highly paid Government employee retires only to return forthwith as a consultant. Too many Government employees, local and national, shirk their responsibilities by handing over the decision making process to unelected, 'jobs for the boys' consultants who simply agree with whatever the Council/Department/Ministry wanted in the first place.

Tanuki

Anything and everything the Government/local authorities do involving "Climate Change".

Andrew Forbes

I think we've got the picture. Contributors here, at least, have plenty of material to rebut Gordon's knee-jerk question "what services are you going to cut" whenever tax cuts are mentioned.

That Daniel Craig's a talented bloke, isn't he?

William Iles

I think Jeremy Clarkson should be hired as the super consultant.

He'll be sent into each council for a day each and told to sack a quarter of the workforce in each.

Problem Solved.

Ted Tedford

Overseas development - including the aid to India. I'm a great fan of the place, but it hardly needs GB£825m from the UK.

oldtimer

Excellent article and many good ideas already voiced.

It is quite normal for bureaucracies that work to expenditure budgets to do all they can to spend their budget before the end of the financial year - otherwise they lose their justification for an even higher budget in the next year. Thus there is a tendency towards a spending spike in the last quarter of the financial year. I suspect government departments are no different.

In order to reduce, if not entirely eliminate, this tendency I suggest the following. The nine months spending rate (excluding capital expenditure) for each department in the current year be annualised to set the limit for the whole of the current financial year (2008-09) and also used to set the total for the next financial year (2010-11). I have no idea what this would save; my suspicion is that it could be a lot of money.

I also support the idea for a reformed and simplified tax system to reduce complexity and cost of collection for both the government, employers and private citizens. Raising thresholds and eliminating allowances would be a good way to start.

The metric for judging the effectiveness of such a reform is simple. Pile all the pages of the current tax rules on top of one another - there are a lot of them say 10,000 pages. For starters divide that heap in two and make it the objective to reduce the tax rules to say 5000 pages by the end of the next parliament. Divide in two again to say 2500 pages as the objective for the end of the parliament after that. Oops! Just realised that george Osborne is already working on this.

I rest my case.

Cleethorpes Rock

Education maintenance allowance

P O'Tatoes

Local Government, top salaries, Counsillors salaries/expenses, all diversity consultants, in fact all consultants. BERR should be abolished, as shouls all quangoes. Stop bribing young women to breed. Stop stuffing social security and free housing down the throats of immigrants. The list is endless, once you start, ie the waste is enormous.

Athesius the Facilitator

I would cut Gordons finger nails-if e' had any.

Forlornehope

All of the above plus a 5% cut in the number of administrative posts in the public sector (with no additional outsourcing). Aircraft carriers and the accompanying Lightning II fighters could also go. All they will do is tempt UK governments into further adventures that we cannot complete. An excellent article in this week's Economist shows why Trident replacement is going to be irrelevant as well.

W L L L

Abolish final salary pensions for MPs. Establish a pension fund based on a % of their salaries, not expenses. An annuity to be purchased from the total of their fund on retirement. If the value of their fund goes down due to inflation, tough! They know who to blame. The same principle should be applied to all civil service pensions.

C Powell

Agree with many of the other suggestions. Much can be done if the will is there but the primary focus has to be on working out (1) what the state has to do - defence / police etc; (2) what the state can do well; and (3)what the state has no business to be doing. We aren't having this debate so it's all about "efficience" & "cutting waste". Rather we should say that this isn't the state's business and so we're not doing it anymore because either others can do it better or people can pay for it themselves if they want the so-called "service" or because it means the state intruding too much into our lives.

However, I wholeheartedly agree with Kevyn re cutting everything to do with the database State: ID cards, the Contact Database for children, the NHS database etc.,.

Agree too that all public sector pensions, including those for MPs need to be brought into line with those in the private sector.

Other ideas: -

No more consultants. Civil servants need to come up with ideas, implement them and bear the responsibility. If they're not up to it, get rid of them and get in civil servants who can. But we shouldn't pay for people who then outsource their job to others.

Cut the number of press officers, spin doctors & political advisors.

Why do we need an Arts Council and a Department of Culture? And regional arts bodies as well?

Why the Department of Children etc (Education as was) and local education authorities? Huge duplication, unnecessary and the money should go direct to schools.

Cut all those jobs which involve bossyboots telling us what to eat, drink etc. Remember that ludicrous target about how many steps we should walk a year? Everything associated with that and similar schemes can go.

Cut the Departments dealing with Scotland and Wales. They have their own governments. Why do we need another pointless layer. Similarly re all regional bodies.

Cut MPs expenses so that they get only what would be allowed under normal IR rules for allowable expenses.

We need a severe rationalisation of all quangos.

Cut translation services and every bit of council/government bumf being translated into lots of languages: if people live here they should learn to speak English.

Forlornehope

Just a thought on definitions. An investment is something that produces an income stream, for example a toll road. A piece of fixed capital that generates a cost stream, for example a hospital, may be very necessary but it isn't an investment. Arguably if the capital project reduces that cost, putting in a CHP plant to support said hospital, it might be an investment.

Of course we have to "invest in our human capital" but when this metaphor infects financial decision making we get into trouble, as we have.

oldtimer

http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2008/11/how-likely-is-a-sterling-crisis-or-is-london-really-reykjavik-on-thames/#more-359

Here Mr Buiter explains why the need for spending cuts to finance tax cuts is both necessary and urgent. It is a long and complicated read but, Fraser, you will be pleased to see that he is able to be even more rude about our government`s fiscal incontinence than you are.

King Edward

Nick @1.49 who cannot spell potato wants to kill orft the potato council.

He obviously does not know what we do!

Kill orft the Milk Marketing Board.

DM

Irish president and government took a pay cut of 10 per cent in recent crisis.
Start the cuts in Parliament by slashing ever generous salaries and pensions.

Simon

All those cutting the NHS IT project need to be careful not to make the LibDem mistake.

It is a one-off capital spend, so you can't score it for tax cuts in the same way as recurring revenue spend.

Fergus Pickering

Pensions for State employees are too high and start too soon. Everybody knows this but nobody wants to do anything about it because of the strikes and general aggravation.

We should follow the Irish example. All MPs MEPs MSPs and whatever the welsh lot call themselves should take a ten per cent cut. All ministers should take a twenty per cent cut. After all, as they are forever telling us, they are not in it for the money. It won't save much but it would SHOW AN EXAMPLE.

Alex MacNeil

Stop public sector workers from retiring so darn early.

Why should we pay for teachers to retire at 60 when the rest of us will probably be going on for 70

Sterence

1. Most private sector companies have an IT controller at a very high level. This is vital for government to prevent the constant moving of goalposts that leads to the massive overspends we see. It should be a full cabinet post occupied by an expert.
2. The standard way of describing salary packages should include an actuarial estimate of the value of their pensions. Any economy needs public sector wages to be no higher than private, on average - this is way out of control. People have to understand what they are in fact earning and what others are earning, and salaries acroos the economy need to adjust to what is realistic given their productivity.
3. The idea floated on this website of a dynamic model of tax policy must be introduced immediately.
Remove Brown's obfuscation of the figures and the answers to our problems will become a lot clearer.

The Laughing Cavalier

Cut all expendiure on the surveillance state and above all, a bonfire of the QUANGOS which would have the additional advantage of throwing a lot of the NuLabour Nomenklatura on the scrapheap where they belong.

Antony Watts

I made a brief summary:

ID Cards £5B
Freeze NHS, schools £10B
Cancel Olympics, ask them to take it elsewhere £12B
Trident
RDAs, DFES
Lots of IT systems and databases, e.g. National Database, NHS
Civil service pensions
Stop all Local government & public service recruiting
Pull out of Iraq, and maybe Afganistan too
Cut, not increase, council tax, 5%/yr for 5 years
All Gov advertising and promotions
Cancel Health and Safety, Outreach etc, close ESTrust shops
ALL public salaries == commercial ones and < £150k
Cut consultancies drastically, that's the civil service job
Scrap tax credits
Close Tourist offices, let private do the job if required
Cut government web sites to max 5
Axe hundreds of quangos
Cut all department climate change actions, except one
Stop lots of unnecessary overseas aid, or ask them to start paying it back
Stop, absolutely all immigration, including footballers. Stop translating things

Now who's going to take some action???