Laws puts brakes on gov IT spending
Promises cuts, hiring freeze
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David Laws, chief secretary to the treasury, and Francis Maude will jointly chair the "Efficiency Group" in order to help government departments renegotiate contracts with suppliers.
The group will also put a freeze on what they call "unnecessary" IT, advertising and consultancy spending over £1m. Presumably someone else will look at unnecessary spending of less than £1m.
Laws also announced an immediate freeze on civil service hiring - with the exception of frontline and "business critical" staff. This should help create savings of £120m. Squeezing more from IT is hoped to create savings of £95m.
The full speech is here.
There will be some more details of government spending, or saving, plans in the Queen's Speech later this morning.
Some of the previous government's favoured outsourcers saw sharp falls in their share prices yesterday amid market fears that they may have lost access to the golden goose. ®
COMMENTS
don't be fooled...
'This is a situation created by the greed of the banks... but on a lighter note it's nice to see the banks making a killing again and paying bonuses'
It wasn't created by the banks. The Labour government payed for it's 'progressive' policies on tick for years - on the back of a bubble they helped the banks create and which we are all going to now pay for.
And we let them because the nice warm (but false) feeling of wealth (e.g. high house prices)created through easy to obtain and cheap credit told us it would be alright.
'A lot of good people are gonna loose their jobs and with very little chance of getting another one at their current rate.'
Yes you're right, and that's the sad reality. You should be directing your anger against the profligate administration (Labour) that brought this about. Instead of creating wealth and employment through the creation of wealth, they spent the wealth and then a good bit more creating jobs in the non wealth producing public sector.
Sadly the people who are most likely to vote Labour are also most likely to end up being betrayed by them (by losing the jobs that Labour created, but that were only ever going to be temporary).
Sure, everyone wants better public services, but the thing is, you have to create the wealth before you can re-distribute it.
I think of it like this - if you make £1000 a month, do you think it's acceptable to spend £2500 on a standard of living that you think you deserve, by borrowing £1500 from Uncle Jo down the road (who works hard and saves all his money)? And when he gets a bit shirty, you offer to only borrow £1300 a month (not even pay anything back)?
Doesn't sound fair, but that's exactly what we're doing. Chinese savers who, if they are lucky have a fraction of our public services, are funding a large part of our 'essential public services'.
And you would cry if you saw the number of schools and hospitals that could be built, kitted and staffed with just the INTEREST we'll be paying on this little lot...
The reality of the shite Labour have left us in is going to be very apparent very soon.
Strapline
When I read "Promises cuts, hiring freeze", I though that meant they were cutting baseless and unattainable promises, along with the freeze on hiring. How disappointing.
Ah! Still fast-tracking?
Ah well, hopes of public service with integrity seem to be dashed after all.
All that fast-track does is let the one's with influence create a conduit for their own offspring anyway. Privilege would appear to be beyond cuts and so forth.
So as far as ConDem goes: no change on that one then?
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