Nick Clegg has today launched a detailed plan for cutting the costs of government, “A Better Politics for Less”:
Balancing the government books isn’t just the political equivalent of an accountancy exam; Liberal Democrats seek austerity for the purpose of delivering a better Britain. The best way to reduce government expenditure is through significant reform, identifying big ticket items that can be done differently or not done at all. Simply squeezing budgets year-on-year, without identifying how to deliver better for less will just hurt the public services people rely on.
Unlike the previous Conservative proposals, these plans will both save a significant amount of money and improve the way our government is run:
- Cutting the number of government departments from 24 to 14 (saving £314.2m per year)
- Halving the number of departmental spin doctors (£7.44m)
- Culling or merging 90 quangos and capping all senior salaries at the Prime Minister’s wage (£1.182bn)
- Cutting the number of ministers to 73 and freezing their salaries (£1.88m)
- Abolishing taxpayer-funded salaries for the leader of the Opposition and party whips (£0.96m)
It’s particularly good to see the proposals to cut the number of ministers given, as I pointed out earlier:
In late 1914 when Britain ruled much of the world and was fighting a world war, there were a total of 49 ministers. Gordon Brown’s government currently has 119 ministers – an increase of 143%.
Some of the growth is for reasons most people across most parties would support, such as the creation of the National Health Service resulting in the creation of some new roles. But those areas of ‘consensus growth’ are relatively small, and to an extent are offset by the decline in the number of posts required by having an Empire.
Full details of the proposals are in A better politics for less, including cutting government advertising, restricting who gets chauffeured cars and requiring political parties to pay for the political Special Advisor posts.
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14 Comments
Well, I agree with the policy, but “A Better Politics for Less”?
Who thinks up these slogans and what have they got against the English language?
It could have been worse. It could have been “Politics Just Got Cheaper” …
My comment is here: http://liberalneil.blogspot.com/2009/09/nicks-bonfire-of-bureaucrats.html
Could have been “the past was better” – 1914, only 49 Ministers, and most of the world covered pink and we were running an Empire. Cutting the spin-doctors and putting the leader of the opposition on the same salary as the Liberal Democrat leader, who also has to run an office with more staff than mere MPs, is a good point well made!
Trivial Factoid Dept: We also won the 1906 General Election with a landslide of 400 Liberal MPs with party-headquarters only equipped with one single telephone. These days, if you call Cowley St., you get a taped answer-machine saying leave your telephone number and someone will call you back…goodness knows what this policy does to the Cowley St telephone bill.
To my mind it’s not simply Whithall where there is significant wastage of public money. This swims right through politics, Mr Glegg. In this country we have something like 9000 councillors earning anything from £8,000 Per year upto £40,000 Per year. This is where the real cutbacks should fall if we really do want to clean up politics. And it can be done quite simply
Well done Nick, Well thought out, well reasoned and striking the right chord.
What happened to the saving of over 50 billions by not re-newing Trident? Is that going to be endorsed during this conference?
I have in front of me today’s Lib Dem press release “A better politics for less”. This itemises the party’s proposed cuts, which total £1.82 billion. Public expenditure is over £700 billion. The cuts therefore amount to the equivalent of less than 2% of public expenditure, which is not much in the overall scheme of things.
The first paragraph of the press release quotes an OECD projection of national debt hitting £1260 billion next year. In this context, £1.82 billion is even less significant.
And many of the party’s proposed cuts have not been thought through. For example, the abolition of various quangos is proposed – justifiably in most cases – but no-one has taken account of the transfer of essential functions to other bodies and the consequent increases in expenditure elsewhere.
Many of the proposed cuts are petty and insignificant, such as getting rid of the Leader of the Opposition’s complimentary car (for the grand sum of £0.068m) or abolishing whips’ salaries.
So what we have here is essentially a piece of gimmickry.
A comparison with what Vince Cable came out with only four days ago does give the impression that figures are just being plucked out of the air.
In Clegg’s version, capping senior salaries within quangos and “culling or merging” at least 90 of them (including the Regional Development Agencies) will save the curiously precise figure of £1.182bn a year. In Cable’s version, abolishing the Regional Development Agencies alone will save £2.3bn a year.
Hold on a minute. This paper only covers savings in the Government machine. There are links but It is separate to Vince’s paper.
Of course it’s separate, but what sense does it make for Clegg and Cable to issue documents containing such inconsistent costings for the same proposals – where they overlap – in the same week?
Nick Clegg & David Cameron are just clones of Tony Bliar, and niether of their parties along with the Labour party have the guts to do what is right for this country and end the sacred cows of the massive amounts paid to the EU and all the overseas aid, we can’t afford it anymore.
Hey, I have an idea. Fire the other half of the spin doctors too, saving another £7m. Why do we even have those?
And who is paying the salaries of the Lib Dem whips now in government? The taxpayer of course. Another broken promise.