Cross-Government Cost Cutting

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I put it to the noble Lord that there is a cost to not having efficiency and value for money in our services. That means we can deliver less for people for the money that we are putting into them. We want to see it the other way around, and that is the aim of this review.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

Does the Treasury consider capacity when enforcing efficiency cuts on other departments? Later this afternoon we shall discuss the National Security Bill, which has several clauses imposing a new foreign influence registration scheme, which will lead to a great surge in new submissions to the Home Office, which I suspect it does not currently have the capacity to cope with, so it will need to recruit additional civil servants. The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill will also impose new tasks as they are repatriated from tasks we used to share with our European allies. We know what happened when the Home Office cut police numbers and when the criminal justice system’s budget was cut: capacity decreased and the Government are now having to recruit additional police officers. Does the Treasury think about this or is it simply budget-cutting?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

Can I reassure the noble Lord that these questions are considered in spending reviews? They are also considered as part of the process of collective agreement when new policy is made between the periods of spending reviews. The noble Lord mentioned the MoJ and the Home Office; they will grow by, respectively, 3.6% and 3.1% a year over this Parliament.