Some Christmas Quiz questions for you. Who said:

1.‘Around a quarter of public spending is controlled at local level; the rest is directed from the centre’

2.‘There are 102 different local authority spending streams, including 49 in education and children’s services, 11 in adult social care and six in policing’

3.‘We will also cut consultancy spend by 50% and marketing and communications spend by 25%’.

Is it a first glimpse at the Liberal Democrat manifesto?

Or (dare I say it) the Tory manifesto?

I will give a clue. The same document also includes the following pledge:

We will introduce best practice tariffs in the NHS by 2010/11 to address unexplained variation in quality. We will also extend tariff principles into new settings, by introducing new currencies for mental health…

Yes – I have given the game away. The last sentence was written in pure gibberish and the quotations must therefore be from a Government White Paper – in fact ‘Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government’ published with little fanfare at the beginning of December.

Don’t get me wrong. The paper includes some nice ideas, some of which even look quite new. We all agree with the first three statements above. And we would all support an end to ring-fencing, better use of the internet, unified public sector procurement, devolved decision-making and only having to change your address once when dealing with public bodies.

But some are duplicates: real-time railway timetables already exist; a taskforce to reduce fraud was set up by the Audit Commission a while ago; and peer reviews for local government were working fine before the Government decided to introduce inspection alongside the mutual challenge mechanisms set up by the Local Government Association.

Others, by contrast, are exasperating statements of the flipping obvious: ‘Neighbourhood policing teams will respond to local priorities…rather than national targets’

(This is an old government trait. My favourite of all time was when the Government announced a few years back that in future councillors would be representatives of their community to the council rather than the other way round. The civil servant who told me this probably still doesn’t understand why such a simple sentence could generate so much laughter).

And some, like the sentences I teased you with, are just brass neck. Who employed all those consultants? Who presided over all those spending streams and the now hated ring-fencing?

Dying Governments still go through the motions of governing, desperate that even after 13 years people will still blame someone else. They also turn every statement into a manifesto. We learn from this document (irrelevantly) that ‘Government action has led the fight-back against the global downturn, preventing recession from turning into a 1930s-style depression.’

And there was I thinking that it was the Government’s policies of financial deregulation that had got us into trouble. Silly me.