The Government’s Efficiency and Reform Group this week revealed progress in tackling wasteful spending, finding an additional £14.3bn in savings for the 2013/14 financial year. This builds on savings of £3.75bn (2010/11), £5.5bn (2011/12) and £10bn (2012/13).
Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude and his team should be commended. Over previous decades, wasteful spending has skyrocketed. The public sector has too often spent over the odds, blowing taxpayers’ money on ridiculously expensive stationery, on poorly-managed contracts, on an army of consultants, on far too much. That money should have instead been spent on essential services – or simply not spent at all, and left in the pockets of taxpayers.
So news of successful moves to tackle inefficiency is welcome. Finally, some common sense is being applied to running central government.
But for this to translate to a better deal for taxpayers, this can only be the opening battle of a war on waste. Taxpayers worked 148 days this year just to cover their tax bill. Yet they still find wasteful government spending contributing to our enormous public debt, and eliminating waste is the first step in lowering people’s taxes across the country. That’s the thinking behind our War on Waste Roadshow, taking our message of transparency and accountability to 30 towns and cities across the country.
There is no doubting that, as Francis Maude himself has admitted, there is plenty more to do. An attitude that abhors waste and chases efficiency has to be the norm rather than the exception throughout the public sector if the Government is to deliver the value for money that taxpayers deserve.