The only tax-cutting Tory in town

22 April 2009

Ross Clark says that we mustn’t underestimate Boris’s greatest achievement: to have frozen the GLA precept without affecting services is a triumph

To help me read the Mayor’s budget for next year I turned to the independent eyes of Tony Travers of the London School of Economics. Boris’s task, he says, has been made all the more difficult because he is not receiving the billions in additional transport grants which the government made available to Ken. Nevertheless, Boris has managed to effect a real-terms reduction in Transport for London’s spending, mostly by trimming capital spending on tube projects. Not services, line improvements or new rolling stock, note, but station refurbishments and preparatory work for a few of Ken’s projects which were never, in any case, going to find enough funding to go ahead. Astonishing sums have also been saved in administration costs: £207 million on the tube and £93 million in the Metropolitan police, for example.

Boris might have saved a lot more on the tube, says Travers, had he not been tied into an overpriced 30-year public-private partnership (PPP) contract negotiated by Gordon Brown as chancellor — and which Ken Livingstone, to his credit, opposed bitterly. ‘It is such a big contract that it is unworkable,’ says Travers. ‘It was supposed to transfer risk to the private sector, but when Metronet collapsed in 2004 the whole thing fell back on to the public sector. Risk hadn’t been transferred at all.’

As Andrew Gimson notes (on page 7 of this supplement), David Cameron and George Osborne still have trouble taking Boris seriously, and Osborne, for reasons of personal ambition, would love to see Boris come a cropper. Well they might be peeved: Boris’s success at cost-control in London contrasts starkly with their own pussyfooting over tax. It is only recently that Cameron has decided that promising to match the spending plans of the most disastrously profligate government in history is not a clever strategy.

Far from fearing the political consequences of making cuts, Boris’s experience rather suggests that waste has reached a level at which hardly anyone notices when it is trimmed.

‘Could Boris go on cutting taxes without affecting frontline services if the recession goes on another year? Probably not,’ thinks Travers. Even so, Boris has charted a course that shows our ruling party for what it is: committed shamelessly to bribing us with our own money. I only hope that Cameron, should he reach Downing Street, will swallow his pride over the man he still occasionally refers to as a ‘buffoon’, and learn a bit from him.

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paul gilboy

May 2nd, 2009 6:50pm Report this comment

boris must deliver real savings and a council tax cut to londoners without cutting front line services. The contrast between a prudent well run london and a prolifigate central government will swing the election decisively for the tories. wasting money on consultant who regurgitate what council officials already produce will save millions, whilst equality & diversity nonsense will deliver the same amount. and get rid of all ken's pet projects and no one who votes will feel a thing. a timely cut will drive an nail in labours coffin.

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