Budget 2009: The waste myth

Obnoxio The Clown

Everybody is too timid about cutting back government. Including Reform.

£30bn is bugger all. I could reduce government spend by 80% in 5 years and people would all be better off.

cuffleyburgers

If as Redwood points out, only 25% of government spending goes on wages for nurses, teachers soldiers etc there would seem to be plenty of scope for spending cuts without leaving oneself open to criticism of cutting frontline services.

Quangoes are an obvious target. So are consultants, and the burgeoning cost of running parliament (staff, spin doctors, junkets, expenses, number of MPs) at a time when 80% of legislation is made in Brussels.

Also how many people are "employed" implementing brussels directives? A good bonfire of these especially the gold plated ones (which could be done without picking a fight with brussels) (that can come later) would I suspect yield many billions.

Finally simplifying tax system would mean that poorer families could be helped (by taking them out of tax altogether) without the massively costly tax credit system. A good headline-grabbing move would be simply to say that all the savings made by dismantling that system would be passed on to the poorer taxpayers by means of increased allowances.

Ideally this would be managed in such a way as to leave them better off than they are now.

Initially, an increase in allowances would have to be set against slightly higher basic rates, but that would provide further incentive to cut spending .

Programmes such as NHS computers and ID cards should also be binned.

Surveillance cameras could be sold off to third world dictators.

Quite frankly it does not seem like rocket science to me.

TrevorsDen

Mr Clown - nope you could not.

Of course there is losts of scope but you would fail miserably in your attempt.
You'd probably be assassinated for a start.

For instance defence spending needs to go UP not down.

The Laughing Cavalier

It is time to kill NuLabour's sacred cows. Blair & Brown promised a bonfire of the QUANGOs in 1997. Instead they fanned the flames by expanding massively the number and scope of them and creating lucrative sinecures for the apparatchiks of the NuLabour Nomenclatura. There is scope for £30 bn and more in this sector alone. Abolishing ID cards would save up to £20 bn and doing the same to the NHS Spine and other unneeded or unwanted databases even more.

Stepney

Damn right Obnoxio - £30bn? We could do that by next Tuesday.

These people need to think bigger.

David Ossitt

"there will be objections if it is taken away by what economists describe as the “losers”".

We the people are the real losers; it is time to make cuts not little bits here and there but huge slices, let them start with the civil service cut that by half, and all else will fall into place.

THX1138

Scrap Trident- job Done!

Sir Graphus

Public spending has pretty much doubled in the last 12 years and nothing has got any better. It follows then that public spending could be halved without anything getting worse.

JR

I completely agree on the premise of this. Most significant Government spending is associated to the Government taking on extra functions.

The Conservatives need to make a proper audit of what they want to do and what they don't want to do.

But the approach Reform has taken seems specifically designed to increase welfare ghettoism - essentially if the solution seems to be more means testing (of child benefit) and charges for appointments with GPs for those that can afford them.

Veronica Blakey

The way to save billions is to cut out the middle men who have insinuated themselves between quango-like into every area of life. In the NHS its not doctors' pay that needs to be cut but the agencies who syphon billions from the NHS for providing dodgy cleaners, nurses, doctors, carers,launderers and every other kind of inadequately qualified health service worker. The expensive contracting-out experiment has failed in ever area it has been employed.

Wily Trout

They can do a lot more in education - get rid of the School Improvement Advisory Services and the Behaviour & Inclusion Services, that won't just save a fortune now but in pensions to come as well. And no-one will ever notice they've gone.

Bruce Finch

I am not aware of what qualifications or experience Elizabeth Truss has to comment about Defence and strategic need - probably none from her think tank arm chair. With 20 years experience in the RN, Industry and now a Conservative Candidate her glib dismissal of the aircraft carrier strategic need is baloney. If that is indicative of the intellectual standard of this report then it is best placed in the bin. The defence section is banal, absurdly superficial and merely serves to highlight the author's ignorance.

Nicholas

There is a huge amount of waste on government propaganda - the full page newspaper advert for "The Policing Pledge' from the Home Office for example. Obnoxio has it right. No time for timidity. Savage pruning will have the dual benefit of saving money and reining in the Nanny state.

Dodger the Dog

One key rule of bureaucracies is you have to kill it. Bureaucracies will always find a way of growing/regenerating - like malignant cancers - so they have to be killed. You can't get rid of a part of a bureaucracy.

Get rid of Regional Development Agencies and many other Qangoes, and abolish many programmes as suggested above.

Areas where we need to try to cut part of the organisation are
getting rid of 25-50000 managers in the NHS. No patient would ever know they have gone. You could largely get rid of the Ministry of Defence, and at least 2/3rds of flag officers in all thre services: more generals than battalions, more admirals than ships, more air marshalls than planes.

Don't ever believe any of the stuff about cutting front line people. In both health and the armed forces organisations the number of front line people is less than 25%.

Dodger the Dog

If Bruce Finch's comment is typical of the Tories, our defence strategy is going to be as bad under them as it is under Labour.

Why do we need the carriers ? Why do we need to "punch above our weight" diplomatically ? Why are our troops dying in Afghanistan ? How do we measure success in Afghanistan, and when will be out ? Why are air superiority fighters the priority over ground attack planes ? Why, 6 years later, do we not have enough helicopters ?
Why do our troops live in barracks that are unfit for human habitation ?
Why is the payment for severely wounded servicemen less than for a typist in the RAF with repetitive stress syndrome ?
Why is there no psychiatric support available to those suffering from PTSS ?
etc

Nothing in defence - apart from what the Americans call "homeland security" - is a sacred cow in this economic environment, and I hope the Tories have the guts to discuss this, not be captive to superannuated officers and their pet projects.

Heironymous Bosch

Hear hear, Nicholas. Only yesterday, I saw a Tv ad targetted at 15yr olds (and their parents) exhorting them to get 'up to £30 per week' EMA for staying on at school.

I've seen the Educational Maintenace Programme at work; 15 year old girls sitting around talking about what to do after GCSEs saying they might as apply for a sixth form course in some non-subject or anothere and get money for makeup and alcopopsfrom the governmemt.

I quote: 'It's bettrun gedding a job innit?'

The programme operates with a tripartite agreement between the pupil, the school and the parents. Slippage in achievement is supposedly reported by the school and if persistent the sanction is reduced or stopped payments.

I have first hand knowledge of a case where the child recorded 60 half-day absences in one term.

The parents were informed when the pattern began to emerge and they and the school were assured by the child that things would change for the better.

Nothing changed. No written work was ever submitted and the child became a committed truant.

But the EMA money did not stop. The school had no wish to report their failure inasmuch as the they should never have given a sixth form place to an idle waster and had they then reported the persistent absences they would have lost funding as the pupil numbers were reduced.

That child was not alone in its attitude. Every year hundreds, nay thousands, of ill-educated and unemployable tennagers are accepted by schools wanting to raise their pupil numbers and consequent funding levels. As a result, this cynical government defers the addition of thousands to the unemployment numbers by paying them with my money to stay at school for two more years.

And those that don't bother to attend school get paid for doing sod all until they can register for benefits and embark on a career of sponging and freeloading.

David Bouvier

A bit confused as to what you propose; your report says that 43 police forces procuring separately is wasteful, but that the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency’s national procurement strategy is a major block to innovation.

Are there structural solutions to procurement, or is it strong motivation, clear objectives and competence that are required?

Bruce Finch

Dodger the Dog is barking mad His figures on the ratio of frontline personnel in the RN is a howler - the real ratio is about 70:30 and unsurprising given the need for initial training, professional training and Command. The shoreside tail definitely does not wag the dog; Dodger is clearly barking up the wrong tree. A shiny coat perhaps but clearly never worn a uniform!

john miller

Can we just go back to basics here? You are a farmer circa 1210. You farm and there are 18 people telling you how to do it. Except they don't know anything about farming.

You would rather they went off and dug up some minerals, or learnt about medicine, or just learnt anything that would enable you to derive some benefit from your society, because all your time is taken up farming.

How do we compete against the rest of the world now that 30% of our income is screwed, financial earnings will never recover as long as that sector is nationalised.

What are we going to do to earn our keep in the world?

wallis arnold

Heard a Conservative spokesman on the radio saying that spending on health and on foreign aid (dread phrase) is ring fenced. Why is foreign aid sacred ? Admittedly the sums may not be that great, but, oh, the relief of not having to work to pay taxes to provide money for, say, Pakistan would be a bonus in itself.

Chris Heathcote

It's all very well calling for all public health campaigns to scrapped as ineffective. Maybe they are, but something needs to be done about the rising level of obesity in the UK, because if it is not reversed it will put an intolerable pressure on the NHS in the future that we will all pay for.

Cutting back on preventative campaigns now represents the most short-sighted of responses.

The economic downturn will put pressure on government department's spending, but the right approach is to use it to demand value for money on what we spend, not arbitarily and clumsily slash bits here and there.

I would argue that the best place to properly performance manage the various layers of the NHS from would be from the Strategic Health Authorities, but the author wants to scrap them too!

Susan Hill

My daughter went to a wedding on Saturday, old school friend. They`re all 23 and 24. Bride went straight from Oxford to become a management consultant and straight into consulting for various departments of government, mainly the NHS. Nice girl. Clever. But 95K a year at aged 22 plus for advising people how to run something she knows absolutely bugger all about (her family are in the catering industry so nothing there ) ? Multiply her by God knows how many and that`s where a lot of money has gone. Did anyone ever see the esteemed Gerry Robinson`s programmes about his attempts to save money and improve efficiency in one, just one, NHS hospital ? To make a guy like GR almost throw in the sponge in despair at the culture of waste and over-Management the hospital was pretty impressive.
What on earth are all these overpaid consultants doing telling people how to do the jobs for which they themselves are being over-paid ? Get rid of the entire lot, save a fortune.
Oh and as I keep on and on saying, abolish the Arts Council. In its entirety. I was once a foot away from Prince Philip at the opening of something 'cultural' - I overheard his conversation with some Regional Arts bod, and PP`s end of it went roughly, 'If the place can't pay its way, close the damn thing down.' My sentiments entirely and I know AC spending is peanuts .. but put a lot of peanuts together and they soon start to add up.

Forlornehope

When large companies find themselves in this kind of mess, the starting point for budgets is what is affordable. As a budget holder you get told what you have got and it is up to you to split out must have, nice to have and pure waste. The waste obviously goes first. Sometimes you are left having to cut the must have. That's tough, it sometimes even has long term costs but if you don't get through the short term you never get to the long term. It is genuinely different when looking at a national economy but it is not so different that these principles cannot be applied.

In a real crisis some things can go very easily. Practically the whole education bureaucracy is unnecessary. The private sector outperforms the public without schools getting any bureaucratic support. They actually get quite a lot of bureaucratic obstacles. Aircraft carriers and their associated aircraft are just a temptation to get into foreign adventures. We are better off without them. Trident won't deter a rogue state any better than a cruise missile and we don't expect to be fighting Russia or China any time soon. Any administrative system can take a 10% headcount reduction without crashing to the ground, so take 10% out of all public sector administration. Finally mandate a 50% cut in the total size of forms used by front line staff.

However, right at the start you have to set a budget figure that is affordable and then divide it up. Nothing else is going to work. Will either a Labour or Conservative government do that? That really is a forlorn hope!

Winston Smith

"Will either a Labour or Conservative government do that? That really is a forlorn hope!"

Ahem, didn't Thatcher do this to pull us out of the last abyss Labour left us in?

pat mcgroin

TrevorsDen, go on obnoxio's blog and you can see his budget where he clearly explains it all

marksany

Please read "systems thinking in the public sector" by John Seddon
Big savings are there, with better services. Don't assume cuts in cost have to mean worse services. This man has done it and proven it - now it needs wider adoption and eliminating the top down targets that blight the public service system.

David Ossitt

Veronica Blakey

Spot on.

David Ossitt

"Susan Hill"

"My daughter went to a wedding on Saturday, old school friend. They`re all 23 and 24. Bride went straight from Oxford to become a management consultant and straight into consulting for various departments of government".

Susan; I can echo that but in the Private Sector; colleagues and I, (we were all senior managers) were told that the London Training Department were sending a young woman to discuss with us our on going training needs.

We assembled; she arrived, we offered refreshments and gave her the floor.

She said "I want to design a new program of learning for you, but first I must ask you what do you do?

She left within a minute; to be heard of no more, we resumed our work.

That meeting will have cost thousands to set up but the result of the meeting will have saved tens of thousands.

Tim Carpenter (LPUK)

Maybe not 80% cut, but £200bln is not outrageous, considering this would bring us back to about where we were in 2001 after adjusting for inflation.

Look how voluntary groups get by on a pittance and do so much. See how private schools manage to survive without an LEA army.

It is all about priorities. Mental health, care for the aged, defence, police, courts and prisons, safety nets in welfare and healthcare. After that, we get rapidly onto wants, many of which can be done via voluntary groups (not fake charities paid out of the public purse, mind) that can be funded by the very people who say that such-and-such is "essential".

Welfare will need decades to sort out, but first we can put people receiving benefits on notice that if they grow their family, no increases in money or housing will be forthcoming. People just do not have the "right" to live, marry, reproduce, and for those children to do the same on the proceeds of other people's wealth taken by force.

Education should be by vouchers and all schools independent from LEA control. Exit, LEA. New schools can open where they want to.

Healthcare provision needs to be cut loose from State control and providers paid for what they do. Ideally, we follow one of the European models such as Germany, Holland or Switzerland with a plurality of Insurance providers.

QANGOs should not be shut, but just have their State funding withdrawn and any statutory powers brought back under parliamentary responsibility and scrutiny. Shut a QANGO and they will want a pay-off.

Of course, we need to exit the EU so this can be done without "imperial entanglements". A Grand Repeal will also help.

We need to sell more stuff abroad to earn our keep. No matter how much we make internally, unless we sell stuff outside at least as much as we import, our wealth will leak away abroad.