FT writer attacks public sector cushiness

The analysis by Jonathan Guthrie is dense, the conclusion damning. A business in a financially tight corner like the government's would become more efficient. But

Both parties are addicted to the idea that they can buy popularity with spending pledges. Labour is nervous of the increasingly assertive public service unions. Cost reduction drives launched earlier this decade have run into the sand.

Median pay is higher in the state sector, people retire earlier on far better pensions, and sackings are much rarer.

The Gershon savings are mostly unattained, and the Lyons target of moving 20,000 jobs out of London looks likely to be missed. He quotes a few examples of poor value for money.

• This week, the Commons public accounts committee reported that the government is spending a jaw-dropping £2.3bn in administering £4.1bn in compensation to sick miners.
  
  
• Last week, taxpayers learnt they were paying GPs 58% more money to work fewer hours.
  
  
• Last year, "a Tory-sponsored study found no evidence that £12bn spent yearly by the public sector on business support supported anyone other than public servants".
  
  

Optimistically, he proposes that the job of state bodies is to supply services, not employment. "Most of all", he concludes, "chancellors and their opposition counterparts should stop spouting litanies of spending, either promised or delivered, as if these guaranteed better public services. They may as easily betoken epic wastage".

We do not despair of the Taxpayers' Alliance just because state sponsored waste continues. It just makes their important work more important. Today, for instance, they highlight the attempt of the highest paid Council Chief Executive in the country to ignore the Freedom of Information Act because it's more convenient for him and his colleagues.

Here, as in the other examples, the taxpayer is absent from the table. A business has its owners or outside shareholders to answer to. The taxpayer is supposedly represented by ministers. Most of them are kept too busy to delve into efficiency - and if they do stumble across over a problem, the last thing Downing Street wants them to volunteer to the media is that the government is wasting taxpayers' money, even though that money belongs to the people of our country.

That's why accountable transparency (first discussed on this blog here) is so important. It would save millions of pounds. Untold (literally untold) millions. Accountable transparency is spreading in the USA. So why not here? Too inconvenient, one suspects.