Take Brown's efficiency savings with 'pinch of salt'
By KIRSTY WALKER, Daily Mail
Last updated at 00:01 20 July 2006
Gordon Brown's promises to save taxpayers over £21billion by slashing thousands of civil service jobs should be treated with a 'large pinch of salt', senior MPs said yesterday.
Edward Leigh, head of the influential Public Account Committee, said there was 'precious little' evidence to support the Chancellor's claims to be succeeding in his drive to cut waste.
Mr Brown has pledged to axe 84,000 civil service jobs by 2008, but official statistics show that only 15,000 jobs have so far been cut.
Meanwhile, Britain's army of public sector workers has swollen at a rate of ten per cent since 2000 and now stand at just under six million people.
The Government's waste tsar Sir Peter Gershon has said that £21.5billion of savings could be ploughed into frontline public service if thousands of bureaucrats are axed.
In March, Mr Brown announced in the Budget that £6.4billion of gains had been made across Whitehall. But Mr Leigh said this contradicted evidence that only £4.7billion of savings had been found.
He said: "The drive to bring efficiency to centre stage in public sector organisations is highly laudable.
"But the Government's confident claims about departments' efficiency gains have at present precious little evidence to back them up.
"And the Treasury must publicly reconcile its announcements of cuts in the number of civil servants with Office of National Statistics data on changes to the overall size of the Civil Service.
"Overall, where there are no agreed baselines against which to compare progress and no robust systems of measurement and validation, the Government's claims about efficiency gains must be taken with a large pinch of salt.
"We also need to be sure that, where savings are being achieved, they represent genuine improvements in efficiency - and are not simply at the expense of service quality. At present it is difficult to tell."
The Office of National Statistics recently reported that public sector employment now stands at 5.882 million, an increase of 1.1 per cent on the previous year.
By contrast, private sector workers only increased by 115,000, or 0.5 per cent, to 23million over the past year.
The figures mean a staggering one in five people is now employed by the state, equal to the combined populations of Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Bristol, Birmingham and Leeds.
The growing numbers are placing an increasing strain on public sector pensions - which are already generously paid and face a black hole of around £800billion.
Meanwhile, recent figures found that several large Government's departments were failing to lose enough civil servants - and in some cases, were planning to employ even more.
The situation is most serious at the Department for Work and Pensions, which has been told to reduce the number of its employees from 130,786 to 90,786.
But an internal report found that the DWP plans to have 107,580 full-time and part-time staff by 2007/8 - nearly 17,000 short of its target.
The crisis-prone Home Office has also been instructed to axe 2,700 posts, but its latest accounts show it will have 4,000 extra civil servants by April 2008.
But a spokesman for the Treasury last night insisted that it was making 'good progress' in making savings across Whitehall.
He said: "We have already made total savings of £9.8billion per annum and over 45,000 jobs have been cut. We have working hard to reach our targets and we believe that good progress is being made."
But the PAC added that there were "deficiencies" in departments' management systems and that savings targets needed to go further if "deeper and more systematic changes" were to be achieved.
