Cuts or savings? A closer look at the UK Cabinet Office’s £10bn claims.
Government savings of £10bn in 2012/13 financial year? Let’s look behind the spin: are the savings really just cuts?
The UK Cabinet Office Efficiency and Reform summary report makes some bold claims, with a headline figure of £10bn saved in 2012/13 alone. Whilst we know elements of the Cabinet Office have done some awesome work, namely the Government Digital Service and the gov.uk team, I thought I’d pick apart the report with a healthy level of cynicsym, given this government’s record on the use of statistics (aka damned lies)…
Here’s the list of claims:
Centralisation of procurement for common goods and services: £1.0bn
I’d be surprised if they hadn't been able to make savings in procurement, but that’s an awfully big number.
Centrally renegotiating large government contracts: £0.8bn
But have we compromised on service levels and guarantees? How much of that are actually cuts to government services that were already outsourced?
Limiting expenditure on marketing and advertising, consultants
and temporary agency staff: £1.9bn
Read between the lines on this one, I suspect a large chunk of this comes from the closure of COI and the freeze on government marketing spend. Whilst some would say government ad spend is propaganda, it used to play an important role (not least propping up a few newspapers). Advertising around anti-smoking, and other health or public safety issues (think Charlie Says) have been shown to save lives. Children’s road safety ads were cut earlier this year. And we wonder why A&E is busier?
Saving money on expensive freelancers and consultancies is a great idea, but again it could also mean the removal of front-line services under the guise of savings, if agency staff provided those services and they haven’t replaced them with perm staff.
IT spend controls and moving government services and
transactions onto digital platforms: £0.5bn
Interestingly the whole gov.uk project saved £42m which was great, but isn't even a tenth of the £500m claimed across the board. Having said that, the G-cloud stuff does look interesting. I’ll give them this one.
Optimising the government’s property portfolio: £0.6bn
I’m not saying we should have empty buildings, but let’s call a spade a spade: they just flogged a bunch of public buildings.
Reviewing performance of major government projects: £1.2bn
Or put another way, we cut £1.2bn of infrastructure spending at a time when the country is desperate for investment and growth?
I also wouldn’t put it past them to count all the project underspends as savings, but not count any project overspends in their total. But I’m happy to be proved wrong.
Taking waste out of the construction process: £0.4bn
As per above, possibly.
Reducing the size of the Civil Service: £2.2bn
Ok, this is definitely spin - cut’s dressed up as savings. This ‘saving’ presumably includes cuts (18% fewer staff) to the UK Border Agency / Border Force, at a time when the government is also claiming (unfairly) we have immigration problems. It includes cuts to the Department of Work and Pensions, who are struggling to cope with benefits changes - how are they supposed to cut down on fraud? In fact, £3.5bn was lost due to fraud or error. And it includes cuts to the MOD, possibly leaving us dependent on other nations.
What’s really worrying are the cuts to areas of spending on Business, Innovation and Skills at a time when we need to be stimulating our economy. Let’s not forget cuts to the Food Standards agency and the horse meat scandal.
Did I miss any?
Increasing contributions to public sector pensions: £1.1bn
Civil servants normally don’t have much to complain about when it comes to pensions, but being asked to take a pay freeze and cuts to pensions and then finding out they saved (cut) 25% more than they had budgeted, has to be a kick in the teeth. So much so, strikes are planned.
I’m sure some savings have been made, but I’m also sure that a massive chunk of it are cuts that have had a detrimental effect on our nation in the short and medium term. And lots will be pure spin.
I’d be interested to hear what the National Statistics Office makes of the figures.
Of course, it all needs to be put into the context of £120bn borrowed (deficit) in the 2012/13 financial year, with total net debt of £1.7tn. We paid over £50bn in interest payments alone!
We need growth, basically, or we’ll have another 400 years of austerity.
