Cross-government Cost-cutting

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 21st December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am glad to be able to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Watson, who has returned after his three-year leave of absence from Westminster. He will find returning a little difficult. I expect that he has already picked up that we are much more polite in this House. If we really want to be insulting, we will probably say something such as, “I am not entirely sure that I followed what the noble Lord said”.

I am very glad to see that he spent his three years very well by publishing books, getting involved with the charitable sector and, most of all, through his involvement with UK music. We have a good group of Peers who are actively concerned about music. I will tell him a little story about that. Most of the time, none of us expect anything we have said in the Chamber to be reported or heard anywhere else, but, after our debate on the national music plan in the week before last, I went to a memorial service at the abbey just across the road for a former organist and discovered that absolutely everyone in the congregation had watched the debate, heard everything we said and wished to continue discussing it with us. So we welcome the noble Lord and look forward to his continuing to campaign for music in the widest sense and to the many more speeches he will make.

We are all in favour of enterprises regularly checking their costs and where they prioritise their spending. Any enterprise, private or public, should be doing that on a regular basis. However, the calls for the Government to have a cost-cutting exercise often—too often, sadly—have a different basis. I noted that, last week, Conservative Way Forward, the Thatcherite grouping that Steve Baker chaired before he entered the Government, published a paper suggesting that, if they were to make major spending cuts on equality and diversity measures within the Civil Service, there would be room for tax cuts. That seems to be yet another example of the belief on the hard right of the Conservative Party that somehow the public sector is inherently inefficient and filled with pen-pushers and people looking after their own interests, and that there must always be more money to be squeezed out of it. The idea that the public sector is disproportionately prone to waste and therefore can be squeezed all the time to save money without damaging outputs is nonsense. Unfortunately, that nonsense is promoted by the Institute of Economic Affairs, the TaxPayers’ Alliance and various others, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose demand that there should be a 15% cut in the size of the Civil Service has, I think, now been dropped. Perhaps the Minister could confirm that.

There have been many examples of non-cost-effective cuts. The demand in 2010 that the police force should cut 20,000 members—which I deeply regret the Liberal Democrats in the coalition Government did not manage to stop—has clearly led to an increase in crime, to a decrease in prosecutions and to a desperate attempt to regain the numbers that have been lost. Another example is the fund spent on outside consultants by the Civil Service because it does not have enough personnel to deal with particular crises. Millions and millions of pounds were spent on consultants, such as KPMG and others, when good civil servants could have done the work themselves.

Other examples include cuts in the Home Office leading to long delays and additional costs in the asylum system; cuts in the courts and justice system leading to overcrowding in prisons and a rising number of people in prison on remand; and privatisation and cuts in the probation service leading to a rise in reoffending. I recall a conversation I had two years ago with a head teacher who remarked that cuts in children’s social services had increased the demands on schools to provide services for their students that they simply had not had to deal with before. My noble friend Lady Brinton will provide a number of examples from the National Health Service.

I end by simply saying that the pursuit of tax cuts at all costs, regardless of their impact on the services provided, is irrational and ideological, and it ought to end.