The endless quibbling over MPs expenses has distracted attention from the desperate of our public finances. Get this lot below under your belt and think of the consequences which get nearer by the day. Look at the projected figures from this goverment for future borrowing wonder if a madman is in charge - or if anyone is!
It’s horrifying.
Christina
nb Good to see that the Telegraph having done its best by untargeted attacks and unjustified smears to wreck public life has not been rewarded by the public. THIS YEAR CIRCULATION FELL.
TELEGRAPH 19.10.09
Freeze pay and privatise services to save £120 billion, CBI says
Public sector pay should be frozen and public services contracted out to private companies to fill a £50 billion hole in the Government’s finances, the CBI has said.
By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Another £70 billion should be shaved off public spending to rebalance the budget, the business group has told the Treasury.
The Treasury is planning to borrow £703 billion from 2009/10 to 2013/14, an unprecedented run of deficits that will push the national debt to £1.4 trillion.
However, even that stark estimate may be too low because the economy will not rebound as fast as ministers hope, business leaders said.
“With a lacklustre recovery in prospect and a structural loss in output, the CBI estimates that borrowing could even exceed this projection by £50 billion,” the group said in a submission to the Treasury.
In addition, another £70 billion will be needed over the following two years to balance the budget by 2015-16, the CBI said. The Government is not planning to balance the budget until 2017-18.
The CBI has drawn up a detailed plan to significantly shrink the public sector, cutting costs and handing over many tasks to private companies.
The group also wants public sector staff pay and benefits to be curbed.
The Tories have proposed a one year pay freeze for all public sector staff earning more than £16,000. The CBI calls for a bigger squeeze on pay, saying the entire public sector pay bill should be frozen for two years, saving £19 billion.
Cutting the number of sick days public sector workers take could save £8 billion over the next five years. Absence in the public sector is 55 per cent higher than the private sector, the CBI calculates.
The group also wants a “fundamental overhaul” of public service pension schemes.
Some £30 billion could be saved by contracting out many state services to the private sector. Public bodies should pay companies for cleaning, catering, security and maintenance services, the CBI said.
Around £13 billion could be saved by making Government procurement work properly.
In particular, private companies should handle more defence procurement projects, the report said.
Another £3 billion of “non-essential” spending could cut, stopping ineffective advertising campaigns and hiring fewer consultants.
John Cridland, the CBI’s deputy director general, said: “We are facing the biggest peacetime deficit in our history, and it is not simply going to disappear with the economic recovery. That is why we need a fully credible plan to convince financial markets and taxpayers alike that the public finances will be restored to health.
Philip Hammond, the Conservative shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said the CBI report is a “shocking indictment of the Government's management of the public finances.”
Meanwhile, a Tory backbencher has said that the official data on the national debt are seriously understating the situation by excluding significant items.
The Office for National Statistics says the national debt is currently £805 billion.
Brooks Newmark said liabilities for items such as Private Finance Initiative (PFI) projects, [see below -cs] bank bail-outs and public sector pensions should also be included.
In a Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, he calculated that would mean the true figure for debt was £2,200 billion, equal to around £85,610 for every household.
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1247 16-29.10.09
CUT ‘N WASTE
In the big debate about public spending cuts the most ruinous programme of all - the Private Finance Initiative [PFI-cs] remains oddly oddly unmentionable. Why?
The future costs of PFI, currently estimated at, ahem, £246 bn can be ignired because they won’t appear on government balance sheets so the main parties remain committed to the scheme.
The curse of PFI is that it relies on private sector borrowing, which has always been [vastly -cs] more expensive than traditional public sector borrowing, but never more so than in [this?] post-credit crunch, What’s more the bills for this and the services provided under a PFI contract are locked in for around 30 years, so that when budgets are tight a bad situation becomes far worse. A hospital’s nurses and a school’s teachers can be sacked but the PFI bills must be paid regardless.
As with any dodgy pyramid -scheme, the day of reckining inevitably arrives. And now it has done with cuts demanded from public service budgers already crippled under tghe weight of 640 PFI deals signed since the mid-1990s under the “Enron” Chancellor, Gordon Brown.
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[Private Eye devotes a sizeable article to the whole question of PFI deals in another section. To type all that out would cripple my other work so I draw your attention to it nonetheless, It’s in “the “In the Back” section on page 28.
Some key figures nonetheless:-
==Barking, Havering and Redbridge Hospitals’ Trust - Deficit £35 m; £235m PFI hospital
costing £45m a year.
==Bromley Hospitals - Deficit £4.9m; £120m PFI hospital costing £22m a year.
==QE Hospital trust , Greenwich - Deficit £5.5 m; £96 m PFI hospital costing £24m a year.
==Buckingham Hospitals Trust - Deficit £2.7 m; £45m PFI hospital costing £13m a year.
==West Middlesex Hospitals Trust - Deficit £3.5 m; £60m PFI hospital costing £12m a year.
By contrast only ONE of 130 non-PFI acute hospital trusts has a deficit.
- - - AND THERE”S much more
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