Public Sector Waste

It has been a shrewd move by the Coalition Government to require all ministries, quangos and Local Authorities (LAs) to publish details of all expenditure over a certain amount.

Eric Pickles has gone a stage further than what is being required at central government level (viz. all spending over £25,000) and has applied the LA limit of £500 beyond which the detail of such spending has to be made public. The Mail has the facts; and they make for very interesting reading!

I shan't repeat it all here; but suffice it to say that luxury hotels, days at the races, massage chairs and all sorts of other expenditure has thus been revealed. It is entirely consistent with other revelations on this topic in recent times, such as "contemplation suites" in what was then Harriet Harman's departmental offices.

Remember that all this is at taxpayers' expense.

Now, replicate this across Whitehall and the quango-sphere, and it becomes easy to see where so much of our money has been wasted in a life of luxury for public servants, both directly and indirectly employed by the State, during the Labour years.

To be fair, some of what is mentioned could well have valid reasons and thus perhaps be able to be justified as a pragmatic "lesser evil" (I encountered a few examples during my years in the Civil Service, so I know it can and does happen) but not much!

The commenters have broadly sided with the article and Eric Pickles, though inevitably a few public sector workers have sought to justify what has been going on with their sob stories. One, for example, talks about buildings unchanged from the 'sixties. I have worked in such places, for example Waterloo Bridge House, where I worked for what became the Radiocommunications Agency for more than seven years.

It was a terrible place, with faulty heating and other issues; but we coped, generally without complaint. My little unit made it possible for in-car GPS, mobile phones and shop anti-theft systems (among many other things) to be developed. The tatty building never stopped us doing our jobs.

To those who commented along such lines, I can now confidently state that their conditions could have been so much better if tax money hadn't been wasted (by some, generally senior staff) on plush hotels, massage chairs and the rest. Own goal by those commenters, I think...

Guido has touched on this in his post about Pickles' killing-off of the Audit Commission, which in itself is another welcome move by the big man from Yorkshire. The Audit Commission was set up some years ago with good motivations, but has (as Guido puts it):

"long ago moved on from being austere bean counters to doing politically correct box ticking exercises, costing unnecessary millions."

Those of us who have served in local government are well aware of the vast and immensely costly inspections regime that Labour brought in during their thirteen years at the helm of national government, and the sheer waste of money and senior staff's time (when they should have been serving their local community). I have written about it myself, showing how just the audit and inspection fees had rocketed by 2005, let alone the (unfortunately unquantifiable) staff costs.

Scrapping this overbearing Soviet-style centralised imposition is a very good move: after all, we all coped perfectly well without it, pre-1997! Along with the publication of all items of significant expenditure, both locally and nationally, using cheap modern technology so its costs will be near-enough negligible, will also save countless millions of Pounds every year.

Eric Pickles is certainly this country's "chum"!