A bunch of wasters

Written by Dr Eamonn Butler
Thursday, 08 November 2007
I was at Global Vision this week to hear Nick Elliott of the Taxpayers' Alliance and Dr Lee Rotherham on the subject of waste in government spending. They've just published the 2008 edition of The Bumper Book of Government Waste and this year the total they identify is £101bn, more than twice what it was when the first edition came out in 2004. and equating to £4000 per family of four. Even the government's own spending plans rest on squeezing out £30bn of 'efficiency savings', so my guess is the authors are not far out. (Remember the shock, though, and the scorn, with which Gordon Brown and his colleagues treated David James's review of government waste, which called for £35bn of savings – you would have thought that the Mongol hordes were laying wasted to our priceless public services by their account of it. Times - and the public mood on spending and taxation - have changed.) Dr Rotherham has developed a complete typology of EU waste, which is considerable (as you would figure, when the EU budget is larger than the GDP of several EU member states). There is administrative waste (like having the parliament spread between two towns); strategic waste (building roads and tourist attractions nobody uses); planning dysfunctions (like the bridge between Romania and Moldova, which has no road connection on one side); frills (all the PR telling us how wonderful the EU is, for example); duplication (national bodies being reproduced at EU level); fraud (carousel exporting and importing of livestock, sometimes imaginary livestock, because you get subsidies for each export); policy burdens (the social chapter, gold plating); policy consequences (all those dead fish dumped back in the sea because the boat is over-quota); and subsidies (like the CAP and subsidies for silkworm eggs). Would better audit controls improve things? Nah. The only way to stop governments wasting too much money is to stop them spending too much money. Bookmark Comments (0) Subscribe to this comment's feed Write comment This content has been locked. You can no longer post any comment. Powered by Azrul's Jom Comment for Joomla!