Comment: 12.07.2010

Keren Suchecki

All in all though, I like this consultative approach to public spending, it just needs to be braver and more radical in application. The more transparent spending decisions become the more carefully money will be spent.

After the budget comes the Spending Challenge, with public sector workers being asked to contribute ideas about where to make savings.

There’s an HM Treasury website you can visit, but you won’t learn any more than what I’ve just told you. It’s just a load of friendly typeface blurb explaining how to fill in a box that someone will look at later, along with a video of Dave telling us what all those written words say (ever get the feeling you’re only three years old?). Not quite the transparency I’d naively hoped for. I want to see all the suggestions, and I’d quite like a Facebook-type like/dislike box to tick so big Dave and little Nicky can see what the public thinks of each.

For some reason I can’t quite get my head around the fact that unions don’t like the idea of workers being consulted on where cuts should be made. Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB, said: ‘Cameron and Clegg have a damned cheek in asking public sector workers to cooperate in sacking thousands of them. It is an utter outrage.’ This reactionary opposition to worker consultation smacks of paternalism if you ask me; do they think their workers are too daft to think of suggestions that might involve saving jobs? Speaking as a turkey, if there was no option to ban Christmas then I’d certainly try to get some Linda McCartney sausages on the menu.

There still remains political divide over the timing of cuts and we can only wait and see whether this hard and fast approach succeeds or brings another recession. With estimates of up to 700,000 public sector jobs being lost there are frightening times ahead. Those regions heavily dependent on public sector employment will suffer badly, and it’s no surprise that these are the areas already suffering the worst poverty and deprivation in the country.

Bristol City Council is carrying out its own spending challenge via their Ask Bristol website. Judging by the standard of their grammar I can only assume the council’s consultation team were educated in Bristol schools and that the first post to be scrapped in these austere times was that of proof reader.

On the up side they do have a nice thumbs up/down option under each suggestion so we can show them what we would snog, marry or avoid in terms of spending. From the responses I’ve seen so far, the top tier of management have no need to pucker up or book a church any time soon.

Alongside demands to cancel the ridiculous new director post to develop Bristol’s ‘sense of place’ at £72k per annum, most people are calling for an end to the council’s much-hated vanity project, the museum of Bristol, which is running five years behind schedule and £8m over budget – a fine example of Bristol’s project management skills.

Bristol citizens have opposed this development from the outset and had their noses rubbed into the council’s arrogance when a Manchester based consultancy was paid £100,000 to rename the building it’s being housed in as the M-shed. Money well spent if you ask me: good grief, unpaid Bristolians might have come up with something meaningless and pretentious like ‘the museum of Bristol’.

All in all though, I like this consultative approach to public spending, it just needs to be braver and more radical in application. The more transparent spending decisions become the more carefully money will be spent.

The instruction from the DCLG that local authorities will publish all spending decisions over £500 had me laughing my socks off at the thought of orders for pot plants and ergonomic office chairs being hastily retracted. But I won’t be truly happy until the chief exec of each authority has to stand in public each week to read out and justify the list while we vote to reduce their salary by £500 for each item we don’t approve of.