Scrap Budget charade and focus on getting value from taxpayers' money

The Government should resist the allure of short-term opportunism and realise that quality, not just quantity, is needed from…

The Government should resist the allure of short-term opportunism and realise that quality, not just quantity, is needed from public spending and must take priority, writes Richard Bruton.

In the past seven years, public spending has more than doubled. The Fine Gael document Who Cares? asked whether our money is making an impact in the areas and for the people who need it most. With the Estimates published and the Budget just around the corner it is a good time to look at just what this Government has achieved with this unprecedented level of spending.

The hard lesson that I uncovered when preparing the report is that there is a price to pay when governments forget about financial control, when analysis gets brushed aside by political opportunism, when the need for reform is ducked.

It is ultimately the ordinary punter who pays the price. It is those who depend on government for services. It is those who do not have the ability to side-step the tax burden when the costs come home to roost.

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This is the tale of the past eight years. While spending doubled, there was little attention to what was being delivered. The growth in bureaucracy far outpaced the growth in front-line staff. The positions of clients in real need were overlooked. The costs finally caught up.

Overall, 61,000 extra people were taken on. However, they were recruited into unreformed structures. There was no proper focus on results. A whole array of new agencies were spawned and new layers of management were created, but clients did not get the improvements needed.

In health, administrative grades grew by 80 per cent while the number of frontline doctors and nurses grew by only 22 per cent. The same was repeated in local authorities and in justice. Doctors, nurses and gardaí on the front line could not cope. Their ability to deliver was frustrated by lack of new capacity.

The charade of Budget Day focused all the attention on incremental changes at the margin, ignoring the need for root-and-branch reform. Short-term opportunism flourished. No performance targets were set for any of the new spending. Not surprisingly, its impact on key objectives proved bitterly disappointing.

Fewer people got access to free primary care. Fewer attended at casualty departments, but they were treated in conditions of growing chaos. The trebling of the health budget proved incapable of delivering any substantial impact on the number of hospital beds available or the numbers on the waiting lists.

In justice, the probability of being a victim of crime increased, the probability that crime would be detected fell, drug seizures fell, and the probability that people bothered to report crime at all also fell. Violence and public order exploded without an adequate response.

Despite the appearance of new initiatives from government, chaos reigns in the delivery of education services for children with special needs. Lengthening queues face children needing orthodontic services. Access to psychological assessments are rationed.

Substantial increases in education spending had no impact on drop-out rates from school, on literacy problems affecting disadvantaged children, or on progression by children from disadvantaged homes to even sit the Leaving Certificate, let alone acquire a third-level qualification.

Benchmarking was paid at a cost of €1.3 billion, but the reform agenda that would drive the delivery of better services in return for this money was never tabled by the Government. An elaborate box-ticking exercise did not conceal the reality that everything went on as before. No union was pushed beyond an established position. The opportunity to put in place a system of public service reform based on responsibility, accountability and reward was let slide.

The cost of this slipshod approach to public spending was temporarily concealed. As the election of 2002 loomed, an illusion was peddled that spending could rise, taxes fall and wildly optimistic promises be delivered. When this was questioned, the refrain was "no cutbacks are planned secretly or otherwise".

However, the illusion was shattered. When the brakes slammed on the public spending pedal, it was those at the bottom of the pile who felt the squeeze. Home help was cut back. Grants for those with disabilities were squeezed. Medical cards were called in. A rash of charges and stealth charges made every agency in the country a secret tax collector on behalf of the Government. The total tax-take climbed and is now at a higher level on every measure than it was in 1997. While the Government trumpeted its low standard rate of income tax at 20 per cent, more and more people were pushed into the top rate. New levies made it more expensive to buy a home, to send a child to college, to access health services.

Like Jack Nicholson, many people may shrug and think "this is as good as it gets". I believe that the country deserves better. We can deliver much more from public money if we scrap the charade of Budget Day, if we require performance from every unit that attracts taxpayers' money, if public service managers are rewarded for success, if we rein in the use of stealth taxes, if we give clients more control over how resources are used.

You may say that this is not "rocket science", and it is not. However, it is simply not being applied to public services under this Government.

Richard Bruton TD is deputy leader of Fine Gael and spokesman on finance