Blowing the budgets

Iain Martin’s blogpost over at the Telegraph this morning discusses how the latest poll results suggest that voters are broadly in favour of cuts to public spending, though not at the expense of core services. It is a bit woolly to think that you can simply cut administrative costs or jobs and all will be well – many of the support roles are critical to front-line delivery – however this does take the somewhat naive view that the boys and girls on the front-line are all doing sterling jobs. I don’t doubt that many are, but I also suspect that the threat of some cuts there would work wonders for productivity.

I eschewed my normal bike ride to work in favour of my car today. It’s the first time I’ve driven to work this year, and thinking about it, the first time in about nine months. As a result, I had the delights of Wogan for fifteen amusing minutes this morning. Nearing my office, the traffic report finished and Wogan jested that there will be lots of roads being dug up, because March is nearly over and all the Councils will be looking to spend all their budgets before the end of the tax year, lest the Government reduce their budget for the next year.

I’ve come across this before. It is something of a universally-accepted fact of the Public Sector that if you don’t spend your budget, next year’s will be cut back, and nobody wants that. When I worked for a recruitment company, we discovered all sorts of projects suddenly kicking off in Feb/March as IT managers suddenly needed extra hands to roll out new desktops and so on. It was a theme repeated year-on-year, as my manager explained, and was a great little boost to business.

That was a discovery I found despairing. Even at the time, I had a little shiver, and wondered why on earth people entrusted with public money could be so utterly irresponsible as to spend it for the sake of not getting as much next year. Profligate spending like that is an utter disgrace, and that is one of the reasons public sector spending is so out of control – they have a use it or lose it mentality, and rather than thinking of how they can make a little go a long way, the public sector seems determined to spend it lest they get a smaller budget for the next year.

One of my contractors had once worked on a few assignments at North Yorkshire County Council, based in Northallerton. He told me about their IT stores room, where they apparently had a stash of unused laptops. These were the sort which were meant for heavy duty activity; water-resistant, shock-resistant, hard-wearing. It transpired they had been purchased a few years ago, and had never been used, but that hadn’t stopped them ordering more. Someone clearly thought it would be nice to have some, so spent some of my taxes and their council tax levies on some IT Hardware which would gather dust, unused.

I remember my manager being delighted, because one of his NHS accounts had actually signed off budget from 2007 and paid us in advance of any actual requirement just to get rid of it before the year end, with the view of using it when the next project came live. That might seem efficient enough, but he wasn’t doing it for efficiency, he was doing it to ensure he got as big a budget next year as the year past.

David Cameron, should he win the next general election, is going to have a lot on his plate. The public sector needs a cull, and it needs a change in mentality. Somehow it needs to be reminded that taxpayers money is something you have to be responsible with, and blowing through a budget for the sake of spending is a poor show indeed.