It is slowly dawning on the public sector that we need to do more for less. Spending and borrowing are out of control.

            I have found going into various parts of the public sector and into various companies that there are common themes to make something work better, and some common rules on how you can turn round an underperforming  organisation. The similarities in the leadership challenge are often more striking than the differences or special problems.

Stressing that we need to improve quality and control costs is not demanding the impossible. It’s what good private sector organisations do all the time. Nor is it just saying the obvious. Good leadership requires setting out what can be achieved, and the creating the conditions in which it is achieved. That requires knowing how far the organisation has got, how much better other organisations are, and how much to expect of your team,.

            Good management is about using the minimum of resource to deliver the best of service or product. It is about continuously striving for improvement. It is about getting the morale of your workforce up and keeping it up. A strong leader defines what success is, makes sure that success is stretching, but then helps his or her team reach it. Higher efficiency comes from the full engagement of the whole team in achieving that success.

           
            Parts of the public sector have too many spin doctors, managers, bogus consultations, management consultancy projects and partnerships. They need to slim down. The elected and official heads of each institution need to simplify, and set out a vision of higher quality core services to which they dedicate their organisations. You need a can do culture, a culture where the senior managers steps in only when things are going badly wrong to rescue them, or to praise and reward and demand more  when they are going well.

               The check list of areas to improve and the issues where costs can be cut and quality raised is  the easy bit. If your senior managers do not know that already then you have the wrong senior managers. There are too many noises off, chasing too many peripheral issues, and padding too many organisations with words that complicate and distract. It is time for change.

The government is busily printing money through the Bank of England on a colossal scale. As a result the Stock market has been rising strongly. The combination of money printing in the US and UK, and the actions taken to stimulate money in China, are leading to sharp increases in commodity prices, which we feel again at the petrol pumps.

It is not yet easing the problems facing local businesses. It is still difficult getting a loan for business purposes, and new mortgages are in short supply. Whilst the Bank of England’s interest rate remains very low, actual rates if you want to borrow are altogether a different matter. There are some signs that the violent de stocking by business in the first two quarters of the year is coming to an end, but that does not yet mean there is going to a resumption of “normal” business conditions similar to those before the Credit Crunch.

I fear we are in for a long slog of sorting out too much borrowing in the private sector first. Then we need to turn our attention to the huge debts being built up in all our names by the government. In the two years 2008-2010 the government will borrow more than they inherited as the total public debt in 1997! Taxpayers have to pay interest on all that borrowing, and one day have to pay it all back. It means as a country we will have to run with a much higher savings rate, and therefore with much less spending, than we have been used to.

The government says it needs to carry on spending and borrowing to save us from a worse recession. It is difficult to see how we could have a much worse a recession. The truth is if the government spends too much in the public sector the best it can do is to delay the painful adjustment, if it prints the money. If it borrows it, it means that those lending the money to the government to spend can no longer spend it for themselves. In those conditions it may not be reflationary at all.

I do hope the government and the pundits are right in saying the worst is now behind us. It is true that the rate of decline should now ease, and the comparisons will soon start looking better because we will be comparing with dire periods of declining activity. However, most seem to agree that unfortunately there is more unemployment to come. Wages and earnings remain under pressure. This all points to reduced demand, which makes business conditions more difficult.

Everyone apart from some Ministers understand that public spending has to brought under control soon. Those of us who want to see action taken have been clear that we see no need to sack teachers, nurses, doctors and other important service providers. What we want to see is the elimination of waste and undesirable expenditures.

Labour in opposition rightly campaigned against two types of public spending they claimed not to like. One was debt interest. It makes it even more ironic that they are now presiding over the biggest ever increase in debt the state has seen. The other was what they called the costs of “economic failure”, the benefit bills for those out of work.

In government they allowed the numbers of working age people without a job to exceed 5 million even before the recession hit. It is too many people to leave without work, and a large cost to taxpayers. A new government needs to put welfare reform at the top of its agenda, as Bill Clinton did successfully after his election as President. Cutting benefit spending by getting more people into work would be a popular cut.

We also need to tackle the large costs of public sector pensions. We need to tell any new recruits to the public service that they are not eligible for the generous deals that used to be on offer. We need to negotiate a new deal with existing members of public sector schemes for their future contributions. That should include the MPs scheme, where consultations are already underway to cut the costs of the benefits under the scheme.

Who will rid us of these turbulent banks? The government has landed taxpayers in a dreadful and expensive mess.

First they blundered by allowing banks to lend too much and balloon their balance sheets in the good times. The Regulators fell down on the job. The government encouraged them for political reasons, wanting to keep interest rates too low and credit plentiful. Few were to be denied a mortgage, regardless of whether they could pay it back.

Next, they made the crisis worse by hiking interest rates too high for too long and starving the money markets of cash, leading to the crash in 2007 and 2008.

Then they panicked, buying shares in RBS, Lloyds, and Northern Rock without valuing all the dodgy loans properly. They didn’t ask for a discount or protect the taxpayers interests. Vince Cable became the apostle of nationalisation, given large amounts of airtime to help the government dig us deeper into the mire of owning too many risky banks on bad terms.

Messrs Darling and Cable tell you they had to intervene to buy all these nasty bank shares at high prices and then watch them fall once in public ownership. They claim it was the only way. They want you to think they saved the world.

Their actions were damaging and costly. Far from saving us, they have lumbered us with huge debts for years to come. So what should they have done?

In the good times they should have raised interest rates earlier and told the banks they needed to be more careful. When the bad times started they should have slashed interest rates much more quickly, and lent money to the banks in trouble on tough terms to see them through. There was no need to buy shares in RBS or Lloyds. Northern Rock need not have gone under if they had seen the obvious warning signs in August 2007 and done then what some of us recommended.

We are now being mugged by these bad banks. The government makes us stand behind them as their owners. On top of that the government is offering to take all their worst loans off them and give them to – yes you’ve guessed it – us the taxpayers. What ever did we do to deserve that?

So what should they do? How could we get out of this catastrophe?

The first thing to understand is that RBS and Lloyds/HBOS are simply too big and too risky. They should be split up. Their profitable foreign banks should be sold off as quickly as possible. There are buyers out there now for good overseas banks.

Investment banks in the private sector are coining it in again. The investment banking arms of RBS and Lloyds should be put quickly on a commercial footing and sold as well. The taxpayer should not be expected to stand behind casino banks. RBS had £500 billion at risk playing the markets at its last year end. That is far too much for taxpayers to have to underwrite. They are playing with almost as much as the government spends in total in a year.

The loss makers, including the UK banking arms, should be told to cut costs and get back into profit quickly. There should be no bonuses for senior executives in nationalised loss makers. If they want top drawer remuneration they should produce top drawer results – or do it with someone else’s money, not the taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the government and its regulators need to get their act together. Mr Darling has recently lectured the banks on the need to lend more. He has told them he did not make all this public money available for them to sit on their hands.

Oh yes he did. For at the same time as grandstanding and lecturing them, the FSA, his regulator, is telling the banks they need to keep more of the money they have in liquid form. That means they are not allowed to lend it to you or me or to companies. The rules stop them.

The authorities have created a self serving money go round. Taxpayers put money into the bad banks. The banks are then told they need to keep more of the money handy and lend it back to the government!

The government was wrong to allow all the mega mergers that created a bank on the scale of RBS. They could have blocked some of them. They were even more foolish to urge Lloyds and HBOS to get together. Merging a bad bank with a good bank does not create a good bank, as we have seen in the latest figures showing huge HBOS and Lloyds losses.

We the taxpayers now support banks that risk more than twice our total national income, what we all earn. I warned when they embarked on this crazy course that they could easily lose us the equivalent of the defence budget. It is going to be more than that. HBOS alone lost £13,400 million in the first half of the year, which was close to what we spend on our armed forces. What benefit are we getting for that?

It is time to try a different approach. This government can no more suspend the rules of sound finance and the laws of arithmetic than the rest of us. If our nationalised banks go on losing us money on this scale, it means much less available to spend on other things. It is high time they were put under some pressure, to shape up and sell off their businesses. And in the meantime, don’t insult us by sending us the bill for large bonuses. Can’t Mr. Darling at least sort that out?

According to government Ministers and Spin doctors the choice before the public is a stark one – Labour investment or Tory cuts. At the heart of this battleground is the NHS, the largest single spender amongst the public service departments. So often these days Mr Brown’s statements are flanked by pictures or comments on the NHS, as he thinks this will be the defining issue of the coming election.

The Conservatives have been very cautious about the NHS. Mr Cameron has strong personal experience of its importance through his family. Any Conservative politician who wants to be re-elected knows that the pledge of care free for all in need is an important one. There are no votes in wanting to close wards and sack nurses, and I don’t know any elected Conservative who has ever wanted to do that. Yet time and again Conservatives are wrongly represented by their opponents as wishing to do just that.

This week David Cameron went further than before in talking about NHS spending. Instead of just repeating his pledges to look after the NHS , he also said that the NHS like the rest of the public sector, had to make economies where it could, whilst raising the quality of what it offered. He will doubtless again be wrongly accused of wanting to cut the NHS, rather than wanting to cut waste and bureaucracy within the NHS. The government often implies no cuts of any kind are possible without damaging front line services.

So who said the NHS should face value for money savings of £8.2 billion by 2010-11 compared to 2007-8? No, not David Cameron, but the government. Whilst implying in the political debate that the NHS is fully efficient, the Ministry is busy telling the NHS to become more efficient at the rate of 3.5% a year in 2010-11, after demanding a 3% improvement this year.

Ministers and the Treasury have become alarmed by the lack of any growth in efficiency and productivity in the NHS. Between 1995 and 2001 productivity fell slightly. From 2001 to 2005 productivity fell by a massive 2.5% per annum, or by more than tenth. The following year saw a smaller fall of 0.2% . This led to the demands that the NHS cuts its costs and internal prices.

So what is curious about the political debate is that the two main parties have very similar policies on the NHS, yet Labour tries to make it such a huge defining issue as if there were major differences around their false analysis. The truth is very different. Both parties are committed to avoiding cuts in front line services, and both want to see more reductions in waste and inefficiency. So the real issue is, who will be more successful ae generating value for money? How feasible is it to expect major gains in quality and productivity from this huge service? How would you go about doing it?

There is a bigger difference over this between the two main parties. The Conservatives want to delegate more power and authority from the centre and the quangos, to the wards and surgeries themselves. Labour believe in the efficacy of many national interventions, endless orders and requirements from a large number of national quangos, with regional authorities offering direction and budget control. Their approach has led to the expensive national computerisation scheme, often resented by those who have to use it, and to events like the handling of swine flu leading to the creation of a new network of call centres offering advice and drugs outside the normal NHS framework.

My experience of management tells me you are more likely to succeed if you empower and trust people doing the work, than if you try to second guess and micromanage from a headquarters far away. Cutting out bureaucracy, form filling and box ticking from the centre and regions could free resources and raise spirits in the hospitals and GP centres, so more can be done for less. If there were fewer central targets distorting priorities, more sensible decisions might well be taken by doctors, nurses and other medical decision takers.

When I supervised the Welsh Health Service in the 1990s I found it was possible to take out cost and raise quality at the same time. I settled for one main executive branch under the control of the departmental Permanent Secretary, doing away with a separate CEO and his office. We invited the pharmaceutical companies to deliver drugs directly to the wards when they needed them, instead of us holding expensive stocks centrally. Many modern hospitals rely on too many expensive agency staff, which makes quality and efficiency more difficult to achieve as you are not working with experienced people who know your hospitals routines all the time. Absence and low morale are staff problems in part of the NHS.

Cutting out errors raises quality and lowers cost. Making fewer mistakes means less expensive litigation (now £1.1 billion a year and rising) and higher morale. Building and valuing experienced teams of people and giving them more say over how they do the job should cut cost and raise quality.

The real row over Health spending is not Tory cuts versus Labour investment as the government wants you to believe. It is between Conservative claims of devolved efficiency and Labour’s centralised waste. Even the government admits that, when they say they are now looking for large savings from within the huge NHS budget.

The latest figures show that the recession is biting badly. Unemployment has surged in recent months. There are all too many young people out of work. It is especially difficult for school and College leavers to find a first paid job.

In Wokingham we are helped by the get up and go attitude of so many people, and by the high level of skills and good motivation. Our unemployment as a result does not reach the alarming levels of some other places in the UK. However, we should all be worried by the rise, and seek to do what we can to make it easier for people to find employment.

I look forward to progress with the plans for Wokingham Town Centre redevelopment, and have been briefed recently by Councillors on where they have got to with the project. They need to create a more vibrant shopping and service centre in Wokingham. It requires three things. It does require some property redevelopment, to provide extra and more modern space. It will require successful marketing of the town once we have the outlines of the new space to fill. It will require improvements to traffic flow and car parking. Wokingham as a centre needs to attract the car trade. People will want to come to a revitalised centre to shop, to eat or to drink a cup of coffee and meet friends, but they will expect to be able to drive in and park easily and close to the centre.

In the meantime we still need changes to national policy to give the economy more chance of a decent recovery. The public sector has to do more for less, to place less of a strain on the public finances. The current levels of public borrowing are unsustainable. We have to pay interest on all of that debt and then in due course we will be expected to repay it. The banking regulators have to get better at their jobs. They were too lax 2003-7, and have been too tough ever since. There will only be more money for business to borrow or for mortgages for first time buyers, when the regulators accept that the banks have enough capital and can take a bit more risk again.

At the moment we see a bizarre money go round. The Bank of England prints money which goes into the banks, which they in turn are required by the regulatory demands to lend back to the government. It’s a way of getting the deficit financed for a bit, but it’s not leading to more lending to individuals and companies by the commercial banks. They are in effect being stopped from lending more by the new tighter rules.

I have talked to local small businesses and to local bankers. The situation is still difficult for some businesses. Bankers are all too keen to base their lending on the security of someone’s house, rather than on the prospects for the business. This model means retrenchment in lending during periods of falling house prices, often the times when business needs most help with its working capital.

We should have seen the worst by now. The second half of the year should look better compared to the collapse in output we saw in recent quarters. The problem is that the longer term recovery will be held back by the need of many to cut their debt, and by the still weak position of the banks.

Travel is not as easy as it should be in the Wokingham District. We are served by three railway lines, the Great Western mainline, one from Reading to Waterloo, and one from Wokingham to Gatwick and Guildford, and by four main roads, the A 321, A 327, A 329 and the A 4. The M4/329M also links into our local system. There is substantial congestion at morning and evening peaks on both systems, especially during school term time. For years we have been starved of government money for major capital investment in our transport systems, though required by government to build many extra homes.

The railway is especially short of capacity at peak times, limiting the number of trains that can run and therefore the numbers that can use it. Congestion into the main centres allied to poor or dear car parking , especially in Reading, makes it difficult for all but those who live within walking distance of the station to use trains as much as they might like. The advent of the cheaper Crossrail scheme may make capacity problems on the rail network worse for other users. The existing technology of heavy trains with relatively poor braking and older signals means the tracks have to be empty for much of the time to allow long safe distances between trains. It is going to take some new thinking on rail technology to make a break through, as running fewer than 25 trains an hour on any given piece of track is not sufficient for our needs. We need easier vehicle access to town centres if more use is to be made of the railway for inter city travel.

The railway is also a far from safe mode of travel unless strong precautions are taken to prevent any straying of pedestrians and vehicles near the tracks. Trains cannot stop or steer away from an obstacle in the way a car of lorry can, so there have to be strict signal controls, one way movements on any given track, big gaps between trains and no other types of vehicle or pedestrians anywhere near the tracks. The Council, worried about this and putting rail safety first , is spending a large part of its limited capital budget for transport on safety barriers (£750,000 this year, a £6,250,000 5 year programme), £260,000 on the Loddon viaducts, and bridge strengthening and improvements (including the very expensive £2,000,000 for the Shepherds House railway bridge). This leaves nothing in the capital budget for road capacity improvements.

The problems of the road system are made worse by the presence of the railway. The railway intersects the road with level crossings at Wokingham Station, Star Lane and Waterloo Road. The latest safety requirements entail long periods of the day with the gates closed against traffic owing to the wish to have a long period before the train arrives to make sure of safety, as trains cannot usually stop in time once they see a vehicle in the way. . If the railway does succeed in using the tracks for any more trains, the gates will be closed for longer to cars causing yet more congestion, pollution and delays.

Capital money to build new transport facilities and other new buildings for Council purposes is likely to be very limited in the years ahead. The current programme includes £750,000 for dealing with asbestos in Council buildings, £500,000 for improved access to Council facilities and £650,000 on legionella tests. It would be good if there could be some some rearrangement so there could be some investment in safer and freer flowing main roads. Much can be achieved by junction improvement, both to reduce conflicts between different types of vehicle and traffic moving in different directions, and to optimise light sequences to maximise road use. The Station road roundabout junction and Winnersh crossroads are both bottlenecks, and both linked to railway crossing points.

Maybe it is also time for the Council to persuade the railway companies that they have an interest in improving the flows around the Station road junction with Waterloo Road, and to make further improvements to their car parking and access arrangements. The Council did tackle the A327 junction with the B3270, which now has much more capacity. . Maybe the railway companies should be asked to make a contribution, so more of the £11 million developer contributions in the budget for this year could help sort out polluting congestion on the roads.

Who will rid us of these turbulent banks? The government has landed taxpayers in a dreadful and expensive mess.

First they blundered by allowing banks to lend too much and balloon their balance sheets in the good times. The Regulators fell down on the job. The government encouraged them for political reasons, wanting to keep interest rates too low and credit plentiful. Few were to be denied a mortgage, regardless of whether they could pay it back.

Next, they made the crisis worse by hiking interest rates too high for too long and starving the money markets of cash, leading to the crash in 2007 and 2008.

Then they panicked, buying shares in RBS, Lloyds, and Northern Rock without valuing all the dodgy loans properly. They didn’t ask for a discount or protect the taxpayers interests. Vince Cable became the apostle of nationalisation, given large amounts of airtime to help the government dig us deeper into the mire of owning too many risky banks on bad terms.

Messrs Darling and Cable tell you they had to intervene to buy all these nasty bank shares at high prices and then watch them fall once in public ownership. They claim it was the only way. They want you to think they saved the world.

Their actions were damaging and costly. Far from saving us, they have lumbered us with huge debts for years to come. So what should they have done?

In the good times they should have raised interest rates earlier and told the banks they needed to be more careful. When the bad times started they should have slashed interest rates much more quickly, and lent money to the banks in trouble on tough terms to see them through. There was no need to buy shares in RBS or Lloyds. Northern Rock need not have gone under if they had seen the obvious warning signs in August 2007 and done then what some of us recommended.

We are now being mugged by these bad banks. The government makes us stand behind them as their owners. On top of that the government is offering to take all their worst loans off them and give them to – yes you’ve guessed it – us the taxpayers. What ever did we do to deserve that?

So what should they do? How could we get out of this catastrophe?

The first thing to understand is that RBS and Lloyds/HBOS are simply too big and too risky. They should be split up. Their profitable foreign banks should be sold off as quickly as possible. There are buyers out there now for good overseas banks.

Investment banks in the private sector are coining it in again. The investment banking arms of RBS and Lloyds should be put quickly on a commercial footing and sold as well. The taxpayer should not be expected to stand behind casino banks. RBS had £500 billion at risk playing the markets at its last year end. That is far too much for taxpayers to have to underwrite. They are playing with almost as much as the government spends in total in a year.

The loss makers, including the UK banking arms, should be told to cut costs and get back into profit quickly. There should be no bonuses for senior executives in nationalised loss makers. If they want top drawer remuneration they should produce top drawer results – or do it with someone else’s money, not the taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the government and its regulators need to get their act together. Mr Darling has recently lectured the banks on the need to lend more. He has told them he did not make all this public money available for them to sit on their hands.

Oh yes he did. For at the same time as grandstanding and lecturing them, the FSA, his regulator, is telling the banks they need to keep more of the money they have in liquid form. That means they are not allowed to lend it to you or me or to companies. The rules stop them.

The authorities have created a self serving money go round. Taxpayers put money into the bad banks. The banks are then told they need to keep more of the money handy and lend it back to the government!

The government was wrong to allow all the mega mergers that created a bank on the scale of RBS. They could have blocked some of them. They were even more foolish to urge Lloyds and HBOS to get together. Merging a bad bank with a good bank does not create a good bank, as we have seen in the latest figures showing huge HBOS and Lloyds losses.

We the taxpayers now support banks that risk more than twice our total national income, what we all earn. I warned when they embarked on this crazy course that they could easily lose us the equivalent of the defence budget. It is going to be more than that. HBOS alone lost £13,400 million in the first half of the year, which was close to what we spend on our armed forces. What benefit are we getting for that?

It is time to try a different approach. This government can no more suspend the rules of sound finance and the laws of arithmetic than the rest of us. If our nationalised banks go on losing us money on this scale, it means much less available to spend on other things. It is high time they were put under some pressure, to shape up and sell off their businesses. And in the meantime, don’t insult us by sending us the bill for large bonuses. Can’t Mr. Darling at least sort that out?

If government spending and borrowing stopped a recession and built a strong economy, the UK would be doing well today. Never has so much money been hurled at the problem, and never has so much been borrowed in such a short time. Yet the more they borrow the more unemployment rises. The more they spend, the more is wasted.

As so often in the British political debate there is no disagreement about what we want to do. All sensible politicians and parties want to end the banking crisis, stabilise the economy and start to get people back to work. We all want the conditions in which business can flourish and people can earn good money for their work. The government’s attempt to draw a contrast between “Labour investment” and “Tory cuts” is one of the more stupid misrepresentations.

In private most Labour politicians accept that somehow, sometime the massive public deficit has to be brought under control. Indeed, Labour’s own spending plans beyond 2010 imply reductions in spending to start to curb the deficit. In public and private Conservatives say they have no wish to sack teachers or nurses, and wish to run good quality core public services. This week Conservatives have been calling for better equipment for troops committed to Afghanistan despite the spending crisis.

There could be more agreement than crude spin doctor driven politics allows. The Treasury itself accepts that there is waste and inefficiency in public spending. This so far has been a very lop sided recession, with manufacturing taking the biggest hit and the public sector getting the extra money and jobs. There is the danger now that too much borrowing by the public sector will drive interest rates up again, damaging prospects elsewhere. Borrowing is just a deferred tax increase. At some point the debt has to be repaid.

The issue is how we can do more for less in the public sector. The answer is not difficult. Many of the techniques that are second nature to private business have not been adopted in the large public sector empires. There are too many layers of government, too much complexity, too many codes, rules and regulations. We could begin by removing unelected regional government, scrapping much of the instruction and prescription that Whitehall visits on Town Hall and scrap large centralised computer schemes that are often over budget and much delayed. Scrapping ID cards and the ID computer would be especially popular with many.

Last week the Bank of England raised the possibility that printing £125 billion to buy up government debt was enough. The interest rates the taxpayers have to pay when the government borrows more rose, as you might expect. It was chilling reminder of what might be to come, as they try to get our economy back to normal. It is still grossly out of shape. Much more work is needed to get us fit and well again.

Next year’s budget at Wokingham Borough Council is not going to be an easy one for Councillors to make. As we sit on the edge of a major deterioration in the public finances, it might help if I set out the background to their decisions.

Over the last five years times have been good for public spending. There have been large increases in most areas, but unfortunately the national government has not always chosen its priorities well, nor has it achieved the results you would expect given all the money spent.

Over the last five years Wokingham Council and the MPs representing the area in Parliament have made the case for more generous grant financing of Wokingham’s activities from national taxation. We have been successful in this. From a low base government grant has gone up by 23.6% in five years, or by 12.5% more than inflation. Over the same period prices have risen by 11.1% and Council Tax by 19%. Since the introduction of the schools grant to pay for education in 2007-8, that has gone up by 8.5% compared to 6.6% inflation.

In 2009-109, the present year, government grants and recycled business rates will pay for 62% of Council current spending. I am leaving out housing which is paid for separately, mainly from rents. Government grants are also paying for 87.5% of the capital spending this year on school renewal, roads and the like.

This year the Council is spending £201 million on running its general services and education. It is spending £30 million on school buildings, bridge repairs and highways work, on capital account. All these figures are taken from Wokingham’s Medium term Financial Plan on the Council’s website. Total spending may be around £100 million more when housing and other spending paid for by fees and charges is taken into account, but the gross figures are not published in an easily accessible form.

The Council has been prudent, putting money aside for rainy days. It now has £22m of general,specific and ring fenced reserves. It also has £72 million of longer term borrowings, which paid for previous building works.

The government is planning reductions in spending in many areas from next year onwards. It knows it cannot go on spending on the scale it is at present, as so much of the money is borrowed. My worry is that they will want to hit local government as one of the easier targets. They could also revisit the grant settlement and make it less favourable to Wokingham, after the advances of recent years.

We will continue to support fair funding in Parliament. It is necessary, however, for all in the public sector, including MPs, to be planning how to do more or the same with less. This is not a good time for people with pet ideas and new schemes to seek public funding,. It is a time to look after the crucial core services, like schools and care for the elderly, and then see what is left over for anything else. It is a time when all organisations have to cut their overheads and expenses.

Witch hunting was always an unpleasant and overrated pastime. It is popular today. Many people have been out to hunt down the criminals, the fools and the incompetents who they think caused the Credit Crunch.

Who was to blame? Apart from the bankers and other financial experts who lent too much, the regulators failed to stop them. The whole Tripartite system of regulation was tried and found wanting by events of the last decade. Not one single senior person in any of the 3 supervisory institutions of Treasury, Bank and FSA thought the banks were lending too much. Not one tried to blow the whistle on the most extraordinary credit binge any of us have seen. They did not lack powers to stop it if they wished. They did not lack information. You could see it by reading the balance sheets of the top four banks in the country, something you would expect the senior people in all 3 institutions to do as a matter of course. You not only had to read them, but to show some judgement. You needed to understand that the new rules allowing such excess were foolish.

The important issue is not which individual or which individual institution was more to blame. It’s water under the bridge now. The big issue is why are we still operating with the same system? What have regulators learnt from this dreadful experience? How can we be sure someone next time round will have a clear understanding of what needs to be done? We need them to answer the following questions:

What are the regulators’ views on the degree of bank support? When will they force the state’s clients banks to cut costs, improve their business, and sell off assets to repay the money they have received? Isn’t it time the taxpayer got some money back from those banks? Isn’t it time they cut the top pay and the excesses , to try to make a profit for taxpayers?

Do the regulators agree the banks in the UK are too big to bail and too big to fail? When will they start splitting them up to create a more competitive and more manageable sector? Surely they could separate out the profitable foreign banks from RBS and sell them? Couldn’t they close down or sort out the large investment bank within RBS and pass that on, so taxpayers do not have to take all those risks?

Do they agree that appointing more and more regulators, and ticking more and more boxes failed to create orderly markets and successful regulation? Do they understand that having one or two senior people with judgement would have transformed the situation, as it needed someone to see the overall problem?

Why do they think they now need more people and better paid people? Why can’t some of the people we have already make the big judgements you need to make to regulate successfully?

Why is the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England happy with the current level of government deficit? Does it not foresee funding problems ahead? Why doesn’t it raise interest rates a little, to offer some return to savers, and to bring its rate more into line with reality?

How does the MPC think it can get the UK off quantitative easing? What is its current view of our inflation prospects, given last year’s devaluation and this year’s commodity price rises?

Is any regulator concerned about a bond bubble?

It is my view – and has been throughout the last fifteen years – that the Bank of England is the best body to undertake the related tasks of supervising the banks, managing the money markets and setting interest rates. The Bank did not distinguish itself in the last decade, so I am not proposing powers for them based on any witch hunt against the FSA. It just makes sense to look at money markets, credit creation and the price of money together. You still need to find good people to do it, but it makes their task simpler if they control all the relevant levers and have full responsibility under the Chancellor for the results. If you did that well you would need a big army of box tickers, looking the other way on the things that matter. If the Bank coulld smooth and control the money markets properly, we would not have such violent swings. We could start to dampen boom and bust.

It is sad to learn this week that several good employees of the Wokingham Times have lost their jobs in this painful recession, and sad to report that the Wokingham Times office in the town has closed. Many of us would like to thank the staff concerned for their contribution to Wokingham life and debate.

I read that my prospective political opponents for the next election wish to make political points about the issue of MP expenses. I look forward to reading the Lib Dem explanation of why Lib Dem MPs have had to repay money claimed for a £1000 rocking chair, a trouser press, and a designer make over of a London flat among the more eye catching items. It would be especially interesting to hear Lib Dem comment on those MPs of their party who banked substantial sums to surrender moderately priced rental agreements and leases on flats in Dolphin Square when the rents had been paid by the taxpayer, only to claim higher sums after surrendering the favourable lease.

The truth is that Parliament ran too generous a system of expenses for too long, and it was laxly administered. MPs of all parties claimed under this system, and some of the money should now be repaid as the claims may have been legal but they were not well judged. For my part, I intend to cut my expenses further, as I did last year before this row blew up. I will maintain my bedsit in Pimlico, as it saves me hours of travelling each day, allowing me to do more of the MP job myself and save taxpayers having to pay for another member of staff to which I am entitled under the scheme. As we need to cut the overhead of public spending substantially without damaging services, I am not now claiming any taxpayer assistance for my flat.

Labour are about to run a campaign complaining if MPs have a second job. Candidates pledging never to take any additional task on other than being a backbench MP do not understand how the job works, or how Parliament and government works. The whole edifice is based upon the idea that an MP can do another job. MPs may become Ministers, taking on a very time consuming and demanding second job with a good official salary. Others act as Shadow Spokesmen, chairmen of committees, a Speaker of Deputy Speakers and the like.

It is possible to do these other jobs because whilst the MP’s job is demanding and requires plenty of time and effort, it is not a 9 to 5 office job. On long Parliamentary days to get most out of it you need to be working as an MP from 7 am until 11 pm, to capture the meetings, events, activity in the Chamber and outside. On the many days when Parliament is not sitting there is much greater flexibility about what to do and when to do it. An MP does have to be on call all the time, and does need to do week-end work, but there is time in a well planned MP’s schedule to be a Minister as well, or to have a non executive role outside Parliament.

Parliament is in my view better for having many MPs on all sides of the House who have current experience of life outside politics. Their contributions to debates can provide the mixture of commonsense and experience that is needed to be amend or challenge the official view. I doubt I would be an Economic Adviser to the Conservative leadership if I did not write a twice weekly commentary on economies and financial markets outside Parliament.

The furore about MPs expenses is the tip of a very large iceberg of public spending. The MPs expenses scheme was too generous, and laxly enforced. It is important that Parliament puts in place a cheaper and tighter system for the future, that gives better overall value for money. No-one can now say that public spending has been cut to the bone, when you read of what has been spent.

Whilst MP expenses naturally attract more publicity, there is waste, undesirable spending and excess costs elsewhere in the public sector. The level of public borrowing is now very high. On current plans the government intends to borrow another £3000 for every man, woman and child in the country this year, on top of a similar increase last year. It is going to become more and more difficult to borrow so much without pushing up interest rates, and without taking too much money away from businesses and families who are already hard pressed by the recession.

The political battle usually revolves around claims that any call for less public spending means damaging cuts to essential public services. No-one I know goes into politics to supervise such cuts. We all go in because we want our communities to enjoy better schools, hospitals and public protection. The party divide does not extend to disagreement about the need to be generous to those in need, or to spend on decent services.

The divide is about how many other things governemnt should do, and how much it needs to spend to do it. In Parliament’s case, we could do the job with fewer MPs and fewer supporting staff. Do we need all those expensive computerisaiton schemes in the public sector, ranging from the Identity computer database through to the centralsied NHS computer system? Do we need unelected regional government in England? Do we need so many quangos? Does the BBC need to pay high six and seven figure salaries to people to appear on a public service channel? Do we need to expand the civil service further, as the present government has been doing? Do we need to pay for civil servants and for outside consultants to do the task that one of those could do alone?

We need to apply the techniques of audit and cost control more widely throughout the public sector. We can do more for less. We need to do more for less, as public borrowing is out of control.

Parliament is badly broken. This Parliament feels as if it has run its course, with many people wanting a General Election. Unfortunately the Prime Minister and the Labour majority do not share this view, so we limp on.

There is an atmosphere of despair around the government. Business before the Commons is light. The government does not welcome criticism and scrutiny of its response to the economic and financial crisis. It time limits debates on the important matters. The Speaker has resigned, the Home Secretary has resigned, and as I write the Chancellor looks as if he has lost his job. All these changes create a sense of instability and drift.

When authority falls away from a government all Ministers find it more difficult to get things through, or they themselves start to wonder if it is worthwhile or sensible to try to do anything. It seems to many of them easier to put off a problem or to delay a new initiative.

So what should they be doing? They need to get a grip on runaway public spending and borrowing, to start with. MPs expense claims have given the lie to the idea that all public spending is under good control and is pared down to the essentials. Parliament needs a meaner and better administered system for MPs, and then needs to do something similar for the rest of the public sector. We need to get control of staff numbers in the civil service and the quangos, and control outside consultancy, travel, entertainment and other costs throughout the upper echelons of the public sector. We need to cancel undesirable and unwanted spending like regional government and ID cards.

We need to reform public services so the public has more say and more choice, and more of the money reaches the schools, hospitals and front line personnel who provide the service.

We also need to restore purpose and teeth to Parliament itself. Strong government should welcome a strong Parliament to cross examine it and keep it up to the mark. As a Minister I used to welcome regular and searching Parliamentary scrutiny of what I was doing, as Parliament often saw flaws I could correct or improvements that I could adopt to make things work better. We need Parliament to have more time to cross examine the government. We need longer and better debates on the main topics that matter most. We need less but better legislation, and more time for strategic debate and audit.

Parliament is at its best when it offers some menace to poorly performing Ministers and departments. Ministers are at their best when they listen to Parliament, and take its better ideas, and respond to its strictures. If Parliament cannot or will not do those things, it is failing the nation.

The press has done a good job exposing the expenses of MPs. The system has been far too generous, and some MPs have made bad judgements about what to claim. As someone who believes in transparency and value for money, I want to see reform and a much tighter system. I was one of only 25 MPs to oppose plans to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act, which would have stopped the truth from coming out.

I am glad David Cameron and Nick Clegg both offered to pay back some money they had claimed and have told their MPs to do the same where the claims were unreasonable. It is good to see more than £200,000 has already been promised back from MPs of all three parties, with more MPs still to be investigated. David Cameron was right to apologise on behalf of MPs, and to understand the importance of this issue to Parliament and the public we should serve. He was right to say Conservative MPs should only claim for mortgage interest or rent, Council tax, and service charges on a second property they need for their job.

In 2007-8 I claimed a total of £105,917. This made me the 19th cheapest MP, claiming around £40,000 less than the average. One fifth of that claim was the mortgage interest costs, the Council Tax and service charge and maintenance on a bedsit flat in Pimlico. It is entirely used to enable me to work longer days in London when there is important Parliamentary business. During my ownership it has only been slept in by myself. I do not need it for any other purpose. The deposit and repayments of capital are of course paid for out of my taxed income.

Some people locally think that I should travel to and from London by train on days when Parliament is in session. I have given this serious thought. My nearest station is Crowthorne. On two days a week business of the House continues until 10 pm, often followed by two votes. I am not able to leave until after 10.20 pm on such occasions. If I caught the 10.50pm from Waterloo, I would arrive in Wokingham too late to catch the last train to Crowthorne which departs at 11.43. Sometimes important business can go on even later. During the budget debate on the 12th May I made my first speech just before 4pm and my last at 1:15am. It was long after midnight that the issue that had generated the most correspondence from constituents finally came up. I was back at my desk at 7am the next morning.

With the flat I am able to be in my office by 7am to deal with emails and letters, and to write my daily blog to keep constituents informed about what I think and am doing. I can be back in the flat ten minutes after the Commons business finishes for the night. It enables me to save on staff and travel costs, as I can do more of the job myself. I write all my own speeches and all the daily web pieces, and do most of my own research.

I decided early in 2008 that although my claims were low by reference to others, I could do the job to a good standard whilst cutting my costs. I set myself the target of cutting my total expenses by 10% in 2008-9 and by a further 10% in 2009-10. As an advocate of getting better value for taxpayers across the public sector, I felt it especially important to show I could practise what I preach. I have preliminary figures for 2008-9 which show that I have cut by more than 10% in that year, which will put me more than £50,000 a year below the likely average MP claim.

Throughout my time as an MP I have always had a second job. The nature of Parliament often requires it, as for years I was a Minister, and then a Shadow Cabinet member. These were very demanding jobs requiring substantial travel around the country and a great deal of case work, meetings and reading. Like being an MP, these jobs require you to be on call seven days a week, and to undertake numerous evening meetings and events. When I have not had these responsibilities I have been a non executive chairman of a company, which has always made much less demand on my time and can be arranged to avoid any conflict with the Parliamentary diary.

At the beginning of last year I agreed to chair a new company for a friend of mine who had been made redundant, for no fee and light duties. Unfortunately he died young and suddenly of pancreatic cancer towards the end of last year, but not before he had expanded the company, creating nine new jobs and brought in outside shareholders. They have asked me to do more to help them, for reward. I have agreed a contract which states “There are no fixed hours of work. Parliamentary duties always take precedence.” I have therefore decided to do more for them at times of my choosing. There is more time available for example when Parliament is in its very long recess. I will make no further claims for Additional Cost Allowance, and pay for the flat which I think is wholly necessary for my job as MP out of my other taxed income.

I trust the proper scrutiny which is currently going into MPs costs and expenses will also be undertaken throughout the public sector. We need to ensure that everyone who is in public service, as MPs are, remembers who pays the bills and uses public money wisely.

We are in the midst of the debates about the Finance Bill in Parliament. I voted against the whole Bill last week, and will be seeking amendments to it this.

The budget was not the budget we need at this time of national financial crisis. We needed a budget that would start to control public spending and borrowing, before the whole country is up to its neck in oppressive government debt. Instead we got a spend more ,waste more, borrow more budget.

We needed a Finance Bill that eases the tax burden on people and companies to help the recovery. Instead we got a budget which marks the transition from Stealth taxes to Spite taxes.

I reminded the Commons in my speech that the way to tax the rich more is to set internationally competitive rates of tax. Then more rich people stay here and set up business here. They pay more tax here. When the Conservatives cut the top rate of tax from a confiscatory 83% to a more normal 40% the amount of tax the rich paid went up, and the proportion of income tax paid by the rich went up. Surely that is what we need again today? The economy grew faster.

The Irish did that on a bigger scale, slashing business tax rates and income tax rates. Their economy grew well for years, as more and more businesses and enterprising people opted for an Irish base.

We need to set a rate which attracts more entrepreneurs and capital here, and encourages people to set up the new manufacturing businesses we need to start to reduce the huge balance of payments deficit. We cannot go on living so far beyond our means. The day of reckoning has arrived. We need to make more and sell more.

The Finance Bill hit all the usual groups that Labour dislikes. Car drivers will have to pay more thanks to the fuel escalator and higher Vehicle Excise Duty in many cases. Drinkers and smokers will be hit again. Business people will need to wade through another 400 pages of legislation to make sure they are complying with the latest requirements.

Just to add to the misery, there are stronger powers for Revenue and Customs. Tax law is now so long and so complicated it is difficult even for the experts to tell you what you owe and what you have to pay. With the government in its current mood of wanting to rob anyone who works hard or makes a good investment, these new Revenue powers are worrying.

“Government of the people, by the people and for the people” was Lincoln’s immortal description of democracy, as he gazed on the battlefield of Gettysburg.

This government would do well to rediscover that.

They have picked a fight with too many largely law abiding people. They have created a nasty surveillance society, eavesdropping and spying on the normally law abiding. We need to save some money on the cameras, the prying, the email eavesdropping. The first public spending cut I would make is to cancel the ID computer and the ID cards. They will not make us safer, but the system will make us poorer.

They have picked a fight with too many MPs, on their own side as well as across the Chamber, by their juvenile and unpleasant spin. Mr McBride’s departure was widely welcomed by Labour, but it has not ended the culture of spin at the heart of government. Even in a crisis budget, which should have concentrated on sorting out spending and borrowing, they could not resist a “Tory tax trap” with a nasty 50% income tax on higher earners coupled with yet more tax on pension contributions.

They have undermined that mutual respect and support for our society and its traditions and conventions that keeps the social fabric together. They have badly damaged our freedoms and our democracy. We need to restore more of our freedoms, by strengthening the independence of the courts, the criminal law and Parliament so all can defend our liberties against a powerful executive.

When people no longer think their system of government is safe in the hands of an incumbent government, it is time for change.

The Chancellor should say sorry.

He should say sorry for the deepest and longest recession since the Thirties of the last century.

He should say sorry for their regulatory system which did not see banks and building societies were going bust.

He should say sorry to all the people out of work or about to lose their job.

He should say sorry for the huge damage caused to many pension funds b y his tax and regulatory policies, leaving people with little or nothing for their retirement.

He should say sorry for heaping so much debt on the British people.

He should say sorry for the wild conduct of monetary policy in recent years, which stoked the boom and then plunged us into the crash.

Instead, he played silly and dangerous political games, seeking to use the budget to vilify the Tories and set them policy traps. He said Tories wish to do nothing, and wish to damage crucial services. This is simply untrue.

The Chancellor should give us an honest account of the dire state of the public accounts.

He should tell us they may lose us £200 billion through the banks they have bought and guaranteed, as the IMF have warned. That’s more than £3000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Even his own rumoured figure of losses of £60 billion means he admits he has lost every one of us £1000 on his bank nationalisation madness.

He should tell us the build up of debt has been too fast and too great, and poses us a big threat to our future growth rates and living standards.

He should tell us that his forecasts a year ago were wildly optimistic, and his forecasts last autumn were so wrong as to verge on the mendacious. He should give us a sober assessment of the extent and duration of the downturn

Instead, he went for too low a figure for banking losses, was wildly optimistic about the extent of the recovery in subsequent years, and continued to understate the future debts by a huge margin..

Finally, the Chancellor should say that he intends to start getting the UK public sector to live within its means. He should not delay this until after the next election, and not treat reducing public spending as some kind of imaginary game or political challenge to the Tories. He should instead this year make large reductions in undesirable, wasteful and not strictly essential expenditure. Schools and hospitals, nurses and teachers should be safe. ID cards, centralised computer systems, unelected regional government, more subsidies to banks and other large companies, increases in regulation and public administration will all go. He will require all MPs to cut their costs and the costs of Parliament by 10% to show a lead.

Instead, the cuts have been delayed, are political, and often not for real. It was a fantasy budget and a very political budget. It was the McBride memorial budget.This government not only divorced Prudence, but continues to hold a drink and drugs party on her grave. That is bad news for all of us.

What do we want from the budget? We need some better control over the public finances so we do not get pushed more and more in to collective debt. We need better management of the public services, so they deliver more for less.

Consumers are still spending. The latest figures show that has held up reasonably well. The savings rate is also on the rise, mainly owing to people borrowing less or repaying some debt. That’s no surprise, given how difficult it is to get a loan and how overborrowed some had become. The public is learning to handle the new situation, by getting out of debt and by shopping around for the bargains and discounts.

Those with floating rate mortgages and other loans have the pleasure of deciding how to spend the extra money they can keep as interest rates disappear, as long as they keep their jobs. Those on savings income have to tighten their belts, as their needs are ignored.

The two parts of the economy we need to do better, business and exports, remain weak. The government continues to hijack the money , increasing the squeeze on companies through its taxes and regulations. We need a recovery based around increased business investment and a higher level of exports. So far we just have the favourable consumer impact from lower interest rates and the extra incomes of the growing army of public sector employees.

We learn that Mr Darling may admit he needs to borrow a colossal £175 billion this year to pay for all the excess in his public spending figures and to feed the ever hungry nationalised banks. That’s borrowing £3000 extra for every man, woman and child. It would be good if he would start by admitting he borrowed more than £150 billion in the year to March 2009, and not the £78 billion he told us about in the Pre Budget Statement. We need an honest presentation of how bad the public finances are before we can start to clean them up.

We also learn he will be setting out some combination of higher taxes and lower spending to start to plug the gap in the Budget. The problem with higher tax rates is they can send business abroad and jobs overseas. In a highly competitive world you need to keep tax rates at a competitive level in order to maximise tax revenue. The UK is no longer very tax competitive and needs to be careful about any proposal for higher tax rates on individual and company income or gains.

What we need are some cuts in public spending. Not from the 25% of public spending that goes on the salaries of nurses, teachers, doctors and other front line service providers, but cuts from the rest. What we need is a government that understands spending too much will cause problems raising the money, will crowd out the private sector, and will make bringing the balance of payments back into order more difficult.

You can’t solve a crisis brought on by borrowing too much by borrowing more. Government spending is not necessarily reflationary, as you need to take the money from the private sector to be able to spend it in the public sector. Let’s hope this budget begins the necessary process of sobering up. The Prime Minister did not merely divorce Prudence. He is now holding a drink and drugs party on her grave.

The following letter was sent to the Western Mail yesterday in resposne to an article by journalist Tryst Williams, who asserted that John Redwood once launched “swivel eyed… hate filled invective” against single mothers in Cardiff. This is a myth Labour have been keen to propagate, with Polly Toynbee accusing him of launching a “campaign of blame” against single mothers, and Peter Hain accusing him of “savagely attacking” them. As John explains below, this is far from reality:

Letters to the Editor
The Western Mail – Media Wales
6 Park Street
Cardiff CF10 1XR

20th April 2009

Sir,

I was surprised to read that Tryst Williams thinks I once delivered a “swivel eyed… hate filled invective” against single mothers in Cardiff (“Mind Matters”, The Western Mail, 18th April).

During my two years as Welsh Secretary I only raised the subject of single parents once, when I made the case that absent fathers should be asked to make a financial contribution towards their children in situations where they are not living with their families. This stance has now been accepted as common sense by all three major political parties, and I am surprised that the myths about such an uncontroversial speech are still so widely believed.

It might be helpful if Mr. Williams was to actually read what I said about single mothers. I said: “Everyone would wish to help the young family that has suddenly lost their father through death, or if the mother has been badly abused or badly treated by the father and the relationship has broken down”. I went on to say that if no relationship between the mother and father were possible, the state should pursue the father – not the mother. I said: “It would be better for the child, better for the family, and better for the state if more fathers assumed their natural responsibilities”.

I appreciate Mr. Williams may be a sensitive soul but I think even my biggest detractors would be hard pressed to accept his description of the above as “swivel eyed… hate filled invective”.

Yours, etc,

You can read more (factual) information about this here, and anyone who wants to see a copy of John’s speech from the 2nd July 1993 should contact his office at the usual address.

For a decade now we have been sold the mantra that public spending is investment and that every penny of it is well spent and well judged. If any of us suggested some of the spending was wasteful, or undesirable, or not a priority we were immolated in a fire of words claiming wrongly we wanted to sack teachers or throw nurses out onto the streets.

It took an 88p basin plug to help undermine that. It’s unfair on both the inoffensive plug and the Home Secretary. If Parliament allows MPs to claim for the costs of maintaining second homes, then the odd plug will qualify for the careful and bureaucratic MP who remembers to keep the receipt and fill in the form. If only all public sector claims were so small and practical. One has to assume the MP or her assistant installed the plug themselves on that occasion, unlike normal practise in the public sector where procuring and installing a new plug would be a complex and expensive task involving the expenditure of much more than 88p. I wonder how much a new basin plug in the executive loo at the local Council costs to buy and install? It would be a lot more than 88p, and would not appear on the list of personal expenses of the Chief Executive.

The passion and anger over basin plugs and the like reflects the public mood that MPs, along with much of the rest of the public sector, just does not offer value for money. If you look at the full extent of the £93 million MPs claim you will soon realise that the main cost by far is the cost of employing people, not the cost of plugs or even patio heaters.

Some of my fellow MPs think it is grossly unfair that all these figures for our total expenses get published. They point out that when the local Chief Executive of the Council gets some adverse publicity for being on a large six figure salary no-one also adds in the salaries of his or her deputy, assistants, secretaries and other hangers on. When some quango head gets done for his exotic travel at the taxpayers expense or for his energetic wining and dining for the public good, no-one adds in the cost of running his private office in the quango, yet that office spent time and our money organising the trips or the jollies.
I think they are missing the point. The anger directed to MPs is a good sign that there is some health and life left in our democracy. People think it is worth being angry about MPs, because they might be shamed into spending less or changing the rules so they are less offensive to the public that pays the bills. People do not think they can make other public sector bosses responsible for larger abuses elsewhere in the public sector accountable in the same way.

The searchlight of public opinion needs to be well directed to start to get us some value for money out of this vast increase in public spending the government has presided over. If MP s together are claiming too much by way of expenses, then so is the whole public sector. There is a generalised culture in quangoland and Whitehall of travel, eating and drinking at the public expense, of employing more staff to do your work, and contracting out anything difficult or risky. The biggest cost by far is the cost of employment. It is the surge in the numbers of administrative staff, spin doctors, secretaries, case workers, regulators, glossy brochure writers, press release authors and the like which characterises the poor value public sector.
This culture is obvious in Parliament, in quangoland and in many a local Council. Some MPs have staff to write press releases, to produce blog text, to write speeches, to draft questions, to attend meetings about important issues. Surely an MP wants to ask their own questions or make their own speeches? If we can’t find 645 people who do want to do that and are capable of thinking for themselves, let’s have fewer MPs. The same is true of many quangos and Councils. I am often approached by paid staff at these bodies urging me to send out a press release they have already drafted for me, complete with a quote from me! This is from people who have never met me, let alone taken the trouble to find out what I think about the issue by reading my website or books.

The best response MPs could make to the criticism of the £93 million is to do it for less next year. My expenses were £40,000 below the average in 2007-8, and I intend to reduce my costs further. That’s what private enterprise is having to do. Why should we assume we can tax everyone else more to pay the extra? We do need a wind of change to sweep through the public sector, concentrating money on the public services and transfer payments people want, and reducing the rest. I am happy to pay for the basin plug, but not so happy to pay for all the spin doctors and quangos that have multiplied like crazy in recent years.