Government spending (Photo credit: 401K)
We want to hear about blatant, flagrant waste of tax-payers’ money – and we’ll expose it here on PolicyNI.
The Executive argues that it hasn’t enough money. But that’s hardly surprising when we have 12 central government departments and 26 councils – all to run a place with a population less than Greater Manchester. Never mind the myriad quangos, job creation agencies, community groups – all paid for by the public purse.
Waste is endemic in our systems of administration. While the argument is often made that public spending is required for “front line services” a substantial share of public spending in Northern Ireland is on fat cat bosses and bizarre state financed organisations – as well as pensions for former employees. The biggest single line-item of public spend here spend is on pensions. So while private sector workers and small business owners have often failed to make provision for their own pensions – they have made very adequate provision for senior civil servants, retired doctors, policemen, prison officers. Some 30% of Northern Ireland’s entire public expenditure of around £20 Billion goes on pensions. But a similar amount goes on a general category of spend for everything outside of healthcare, pensions, and education. So while welfare claimants get all the media attention as the main source of waste, little attention is paid to the quangos with senior executives and Board members paid hundreds of thousands per annum – and no real accountability for performance. Indeed welfare payments only account for some 11% of public spend here – certainly not the main source of flagrant waste.
The media’s performance at exposing the extent of the public-purse get-rich-quick schemes has improved markedly. But we’re sure that more could be done. If you can point us at examples of flagrant waste, pointless job creation schemes, absurd wage levels for senior executives in quangos, or eye-watering pension packages, please let us know.
Reblogged this on Jeff Peel's Diary.
Local councils should be the first for the chop. They are only such a small size so that more people can live in a council that is controlled by their “side”. The original seven-council plan with real devolution of powers was (despite its questionable boundaries) far preferable to the later insipid eleven- or fifteen-council proposals, which stank of communal carve-up and eventually came to a crashing halt due to a disagreement over the communal balance of Belfast.
If we believe in limited government, we should also believe in decisions being made as close to the citizen as possible. This does not mean that smaller is always better – sometimes economy of scale is inescapable. It is clear that local councils are at present far too small to play any meaningful role, and so increasing their size would (counterintuitively) support localism by allowing real powers to be devolved to them.
Six counties plus Belfast would be more sensible – with Fermanagh either partially or fully merged with Tyrone due to its small population, and with Armagh taking over bordering population centres in West Down (Banbridge and Newry). This has several advantages, not least the historical and cultural legitimacy of using traditional counties as a basis. The number and location of councils would then also match the proposed five or six acute hospitals, giving a possible role for councils in their oversight. This would seem to indicate that such councils would also be the right size for other public-sector oversight roles. They would be large enough to be able to raise and spend meaningful amounts of money on local issues such as rural roads and town centres.
The only significant argument against such an arrangement (and admittedly it is a good one) is that it would lead to one-community control of most councils. This however is already the case in the majority of existing councils. On the other hand, giving one “side” an overwhelming majority may (again counterintuitively) loosen up the political balance within the designations, as it would remove the motivation for block voting to keep themmuns out. With luck, we could eventually see the big parties within one community actively trying to woo voters from the other community to make up the numbers, rather than appealing to the core communal vote.
In order for goodwill to flourish though, local councils should be stripped of all powers in contentious policy areas. For example, currently we have very visible local community fiefdoms where the Irish language (and occasionally Ulster-Scots) is either prominent or completely absent, according to local council makeup. This reinforces segregation into Unionist and Nationalist areas of control. Instead, there should be an overall language and signage policy for all of NI. That does not mean that regional variations cannot be accommodated within such a policy, but it does mean that contentious matters are kept firmly within Stormont’s mutual veto system.
Of course, the danger of this is that nothing contentious ever gets decided, but that’s a problem in any case.