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David Craig: They've spent our money, but has it made any difference?
IF you had left Britain just after the 1997 election which swept Tony Blair's New Labour to power, and then returned this year to hear Gordon Brown relaunching his government with the first draft of his November Queen's speech, you would be struck by a worrying similarity between what was being promised by the two men.
In 1997, Blair pledged he would reform our public services, yet more than a decade later, Brown was still promising public services reform.
In many cases, the words used by Blair and Brown were almost exactly the same. For example, in 1997, Blair pledged "we will relieve the police of unnecessary bureaucratic burdens to get more officers back on the beat". In 2008, Brown committed that the police would have "less paperwork and more time on the beat".
But there is one important difference – during the last 11 years, this Government has increased public spending by more than 1 trillion of our money (about 1,229,100,000,000) implementing its 1997 promises to transform our hospitals, schools, police, pensions and social services. Yet, by mid-2008, after this vast almost unimaginable sum has been spent, the Government seemed to be giving us pretty much the same commitments that it had made 11 years earlier.
In health, they will have spent around 269bn more than if they had kept spending at 1997 levels. In education, the figure is over 185bn. In policing and justice, there's another 80bn. In social security benefits, a massive 343bn. Then with defence, housing, the EU and other services, we can add on about 350bn more.
So what have we got for our money – schools and hospitals that are the best in the world, a safe society with a falling crime rate, a simplified and equitable tax system, contented pensioners wiling out their twilight years in financially secure contentment, increased social mobility through greater opportunities for the less well-off and balanced and stable immigration that benefits both our country and the new arrivals?
Unfortunately, the signs are far from good.
In the NHS, more than 34,000 people a year die unnecessarily in our hospitals and another 25,000 are unnecessarily permanently disabled. The numbers of deaths from hospital-acquired infections spiral ever upwards and are now more than 50 times higher than some other European countries. If you have a stroke or get cancer, you are much more likely to die if you are treated in our NHS than if you lived in most of our European neighbours.
Meanwhile, the number of managers in the NHS has doubled, while the number of beds has declined. When this Government came to power, there were around 12 hospital beds per manager, now there are fewer than five. Yet the NHS still spends about 600m a year (around 15,000 per manager) on management consultants to tell these managers how to do their jobs.
Our police budget increase of more than 40 per cent has led to an 11 per cent increase in the number of police officers and a 62 per cent rise in the number of mostly administrative staff. On our streets, violent crime has more than doubled under this Government while around 700 police stations have been closed.
Brown's Government now spends an impressive 90 per cent more on education than it did in 1997. Yet, in spite of a decade of economic growth, the number of NEETs (people not in education, employment or training) has increased so that we now have more 16- to 24-year-olds, who are both unemployed and unemployable, than almost any other European country.
To pay for the Government's massive increase in public spending, Brown's tax
machine has been remarkably effective in squeezing the powerless, while this Government's big business friends hardly know what the word "tax" even means.
Since New Labour came to power, taxes on ordinary families have almost doubled.
Yet in spite of record profits
for the last decade, the tax revenue from our banks and our largest companies has hardly changed.
Although this Government pledged to reduce pensioner poverty, the number of private-sector final-salary pension schemes has more than halved, while the cost of public-sector pensions has doubled.
This has resulted in 23 million private-sector workers now paying more each month into the pensions of a few million retired public-sector workers than they do into their own pension savings.
Our MPs have the most generous pension scheme in the country. We taxpayers would have to put around 50,000 a year into our pension funds to receive the same level of pension that our MPs have given themselves at our expense.
This Government has burdened us with billions of pounds of new quangos and regulators. Many of these duplicate and even triplicate each other's work and each year they hugely increase their numbers of staff, their budgets and their own salaries. Yet most fail to do anything apart from helping themselves. In health, for example, this Government has set up at least six new regulators costing us more than 450m a year. But hospital-acquired infections and avoidable deaths increase every year.
When we first elected this Government, we were prepared to pay more tax in return for improved public services. We certainly got the increased taxes – it's far from obvious that there has been the slightest improvement in any of our public services.
David Craig is the author of: Squandered: How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money. (Constable April 2008)
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