Government Efficiency and Reform

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for advance sight of his statement. His statement today has a little bit more content than his empty statement of two weeks ago, but only a little bit more. One has to wonder again why it is that I keep being called to this House for his statements. Is it perhaps because he wants to continue his very long career of public office in the other place after May and is using Hansard to scrub up his CV? Or is it, more seriously, to distract me and this place from the disarray that is now besetting the Conservative party’s election campaign? Perhaps his and his colleagues’ time would have been better spent today deploring the despicable actions of the Tory candidate for Dudley North or by explaining to the public where the axe will fall, following last week’s confirmation of the Chancellor’s extreme spending cuts in the next Parliament.

The Minister has carried out his job in government of identifying efficiency savings with zeal and his work to reduce the cost of government bureaucracy is welcome. While I might disagree with him on occasion, I do not question his motives to reduce costs. I also commend the civil service for its work on the shared agenda.

The Minister for the Cabinet Office thanked the Chancellor for his support on this agenda, but I have to say to the right hon. Gentleman that it really should be the other way around. It is clear from the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Institute for Fiscal Studies that after the Chancellor’s Budget last week, unprotected Departments will face huge and colossal cuts to meet his spending plans and unfunded tax cuts. With all due respect to the Minister, no amount of back-office efficiencies will save front-line police, armed forces or social care services, or working families from the Government’s secret VAT plans. Only so much can be got from efficiency savings and even with his savings in this Parliament, the Government are still only halfway to their own deficit reduction targets. That is why, even with his savings, public services would face even bigger cuts in the next Parliament than they have in this one. Opposition Members have a better plan. We will balance the books in a fair way, ensuring a recovery for the many, not just for the privileged few.

We broadly support the approach to land and property that the Minister has outlined. On digital government, I am pleased to see that he has been reading our independent review on this topic. Just weeks ago, he was saying that the Government Digital Service could not work with councils to improve services and save money. Now he is championing this, and I welcome his conversion today. We agree that stronger functional skills in the civil service are important, and we will examine in detail the Minister’s plans for new commercial directors and a new project leadership programme.

Any new Government will have to think about how we can provide better and more responsive public services with less, but with just a few weeks to go, the country faces a clear choice at the election. No amount of spinning on efficiency savings will hide the Tories’ true agenda of cutting front-line public services and hitting families with a rise in VAT.

[Mr Maude]

I am very sorry that the hon. Lady has been so mean-minded about this. She has cast some unworthy aspersions on the reasons for my statement. The historic purpose of the House is to vote Supply and scrutinise the way in which Governments spend their money. I am astonished that, when I come to the House to explain how this Government have delivered savings running into tens of billions of pounds, and have protected front-line services by taking out the cost of government, the hon. Lady should trivialise something that is at the core of the historic mission of the House of Commons. She has done no honour to her position.

The hon. Lady should reflect on the fact that the Office for National Statistics, which began its series on public sector productivity in 1997, has shown that during the years of the Labour Government, up to 2010, productivity in that sector remained flat, while productivity in the nearest analogue, the private services sector, rose by nearly 30%. She should reflect on the difference that could have been made to the deficit of historic proportions that her party bequeathed to the coalition.

The hon. Lady talked about the future, and about the contribution that could be made by what she described as back-office efficiencies. We are talking about much more than back-office efficiencies; we are talking about the introduction of very different and improved ways of delivering public services. That can be done, and we have shown that it can be done. The public’s expectations in terms of the quality of public services are, properly, rising; the demand in terms of the quantity of public services is also rising as people—happily—live longer; and the amount of money that is available to support those public services is less, thanks to the deficit that we inherited.

We therefore must do more, and do it better, with less money. We have shown over the last five years that that can be done, and we have also shown that it needs to be done again. There should never be an end to efficiencies. The most efficient organisations in the world always look for further efficiency savings every year, and that is what this Government, under a Conservative leadership, will do in the next Parliament.