Wokingham MP John Redwood has co-authored a new pamphlet for The Bow Group which highlights the large sums of money spent by Government departments on administration and bureaucracy.

“More for Less: Cutting Public Spending, Protecting Public Services” looks at the annual accounts for the main Whitehall departments, which were published just before the summer recess. The pamphlet uses the Government’s own figures to identify what they are spending on staffing, human resources, pensions and programme costs, how much they think they will have to cut from each department’s budget to balance the books, and what can be done to deliver great efficiencies and reduce the cost of public provision without harming essential front line public services.

Among some of the points highlighted in the pamphlet are the following:

* The Government has over the last year gone on a spending splurge for the banks in the form of quantitative easing, bank guarantees, equity purchases, borrowing and bailouts totalling more than £750 billion. By way of comparison, the annual NHS budget is £117 billion.

* When the Conservative Party suggested that public spending could be reduced by £34 billion in 2005, Alistair Darling claimed this would be the equivalent of sacking “every teacher, every GP and every nurse in the country”. Yet the Government are now planning their own cuts of £35 billion in 2009-10 as part of a value for money programme.

* Going through the accounts of the main Whitehall departments, certain themes are common to them all. They all have too many quangos, expensive top staff, and bloated advertising and spin budgets. The Department for Communities and Local Government has 75 members of staff employed in communications, and 123 staff earning more than £100,000 a year. The Home Office employs 92 staff whose function is “unknown”.

* The public sector pensions bill dwarves our existing financial commitments. The civil service pensions bill totals £7.1 billion, while unfunded public sector schemes and deficits in funded public sector schemes are now around £1 trillion – on top of all our existing hundreds of billions in debt and obligations.

* There is a big gap between the best of the public sector and the best of the private sector. The error rates in some Whitehall departments are very high. The average number of staff sick days per year in the private sector is three; in the DWP it is nine and in the Ministry of Justice it is ten.

* There is much that an incoming Government could do on its first day in office to curb spending and instil a more responsible attitude towards taxpayers’ money in Whitehall, such as freezing external recruitment, slimming down senior management structures, halving the advertising budget, banning consultancy contracts and scrapping wasteful and unnecessary programme spending.

You can download “More for Less: Cutting Public Spending, Protecting Public Services” by John Redwood and Carl Thomson by clicking here.