Pressure groups call for CLG budget cuts
The Communities and Local Government department should be slimmed down in a drive to cut wasteful public spending, according to right-wing pressure groups.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance and Institute of Directors have published a list of suggestions for saving £50 billion in public spending. While the proposals say spending on social housing should not drop, given high demand for homes, the report suggests cutting CLG’s remaining budget by 25 per cent.
This would deliver a saving of £1.3 billion from the department’s £37.4 billion budget for 2010/11. The report says: ‘Cuts should fall first on the programmes and target setting devices which manage local authorities. More emphasis should be put on improving local democracy and accountability instead.
‘Users of local services are the best judges of their quality, and ensuring that local authorities are fully transparent to local residents is a much more effective way of prioritising and assessing councils’ actions.’
The Sustainable Development Commission also comes under fire for being a political campaign: ‘It is not an expert advisor, but a political campaign and whatever its merits may be, such campaigns should not be paid for through public funds,’ the report states.
Trades Union Congress general secretary Brendan Barber yesterday warned against cuts in public spending. Speaking at the TUC’s annual congress he said cuts would lead to a ‘double-quick double dip recession’ and would ‘scar for life a whole generation of young people’.
Prime minister Gordon Brown is due to address the conference today.
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Readers' comments (6)
Peter | 14/09/2009 12:06 pm
Is this a call for de-centralisation??? Is everything coming back to the local authority? Or are we looking for a scapegoat? Hmmm
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St Alban | 14/09/2009 1:52 pm
Right wing pressure groups calling for the undoing of part of the Thatcher legacy. What interesting times we live in!
Whilst supporting the return of services and spending to local control - the massive centralisation of power having failed to serve over the past 30 years - do the projected savings take into account the need to provide these services locally, or is it assumed that they will be funded through local cuts, in which case perhaps the shadow of Thatcher has not yet passed.
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Joe Halewood | 14/09/2009 2:05 pm
Is this saving to be used for the street by street quangos the shadow housing minister wants to set up?
And its not just the Thatcher legacy either. Taking decision making down to its lowest level is the principle of Subsidiarity - Anyone remember the Tory hatred and vitriol against that (EU) term?
The Lady is not for turning except she will be turning soon in her grave soon - at the publics expense as well. Is part of the £1.3bn going to pay for that?
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Jim Paton | 14/09/2009 9:19 pm
"Users of local services are the best judges of their quality, and ensuring that local authorities are fully transparent to local residents is a much more effective way of prioritising and assessing councils’ actions."
How this would work out in practice would be more undemocratic "focus groups" and "consultation" exercises rigged by specialist contractors. There will be more straw polls along the lines of a choice between the red route or the blue route but no option to say "we don't want a road at all". If that's too much bother you can always produce out of a hat the results of a "consultation" nobody affected has heard about or only received the notice after the closing date.
Smoke and mirrors!
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Joe Halewood | 15/09/2009 12:49 pm
The duplicity here is clear for all to see. When the Conservatives held very little in terms of local council seats, local government was seen as a pariah and run by rabid left-wing lesbo commies etc etc etc that only wanted to spend money on one-legged peruvian glue sniffers who committed allegaiance to palestine. This is in addition to how dare the "Common Market" Burghers of Brussels etc etc tell us that subsidiarity is the way forward.
Now that Tories have a majority of local government ..... er....yes we see the exact opposite. It seems these right-wing groups are incredibly fickle with principles and simply change them to suit circumstances. Knee-jerk Daily Mail inspired rhetoric seems the Tories underpinning for social policy.
Anyone for the next tory government widening RTB?
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steve roberts | 16/09/2009 8:04 am
So once again public service become the scape goat for the failure of the financial services and their gross irresponsibility in bringing the economy to its knees. Rather than cutting public services, I would suggest a moratorium on all bonus paid to bankers and executives - after all, they've only been 'earned' because the public purse (ie us) bailed them out so it's our cash that's paying their bonuses in the majority of cases - what an irony. I'd also propose that any public money that was 'loaned' to the financial institutions be repaid as a first priority, hence ensuring a return of the billions back into the economy that has caused this crisis in the first instance. This whole scenario illustrates where government and business priorities really lie - happy to plough billions of public money into propping up the greedy, irresponsible financial system but not to adequately fund essential public services. What a system !!
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