Feb 04 2007
The cuts are coming
Gordon Brown has delayed his three year plans for public spending until the autumn. It is so good of him to let the new Chancellor announce them.
I suspect it is because the next three year plan will have to control spending tightly, unlike the most recent six years.
It would be good if the government could see this as a welcome opportunity to cut out parts of government we do not need, and to obtain greater efficiency from the parts we do. Gordon Brown made a good start when he proposed reducing civil service posts by 84,000- we need progress in implementing that without recreating the posts elsewhere in the public sector.
What a sensible Chancellor would discover is that cuts can be popular. Imagine the joy if the government came to its senses over regional government, and agreed to close down the unelected regional offices and Assemblies.
I read that Gordon Brown would like to close down the DTI. That may be a little extreme, as we do need a voice for business in government, and a competition and commerce desk. But it is surely right that there are too many penny packet schemes administered by too many officials that would repay a good cull.
If the government was serious about deregulation there could be a good reduction in the numbers involved in drafting new regulations and supervising old ones.
More of the work of the housing department could be carried out
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John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
They don’t only go into public spending overdrive, they go into overdrive launching a plethora of new initiatives and legislation at the same time. They inject too much money into the civil service and local government, splashing out on recruiting hoardes of ‘policy’ people, rather than spending it on a sustainable growth of core services.
Then when the cuts come it’s the more traditional (and necessary) services that suffer. They haven’t grown during the spending round. It’s all the ‘trendy’ new initiatives and talking shops that have sprung up because of pointless legislation and eye-catching PR stunts. If anything all these ‘new’ services (many of them ‘internal’ services) just hamper everyone else, dragging people away from their desks to nonsensical meetings and spamming up everyones inboxes with reams of mindnumbing drivel.
You mention ‘any sensible manager’, in local government? Are you having a laugh? What happens is that the senior management divy up the cuts between the different directorates, the middle managers then divy up their share of cuts between the various services deciding what jobs go. The problem is that most of them are involved in a mad passionate love affair with all their ‘trendy’ new-labour initiatives. They look great on the old CV should some well-paid cushy policy job crop up in the pages of the Guardian one Wednesday.
Yes they cut some of the rubbish out, but although they spout on about ‘not cutting any core services’, that’s exactly what they do. Even though the core services never grew in the spending round they get cut too.
The best way to make public services more efficient would be to ‘cut’ all the pointless legislation off the statute book and scrap all these silly initiative that we’re perminently bombarded with. Then all of the pointless people in the public sector become naturally redundant and everyone will be able to get on with what they were supposed to be doing in the first place.
Response
Sometimes officers recommend cuts in crucial services to make a point or to protect the administrative budgets which support them. Councillors should not accept this, and push hard to get reductions in trendy initiatives and back office costs.