Adam Smith Institute

Justice now has prisons. The police are not supposed to be directed from there, even if they behave often as if they do. Counterterrorism is defence; borders are foreign relations. Parliament ought to make the criminal law (perhaps taking advice of the Law Commission, not sneering at it). Everything else the Home Office does, including farming dozens and dozens of semi-detached public bodies, and inserting ever more tentacles in the voluntary sector, is solely in pursuit of the Home Office's own empire of social authoritarianism.

There are several acres of Westminster under its occupation that could be ploughed-up and used for the public grazing of goats more usefully.

I have come to the conclusion that a Minister for IT is required these days. The position needs to be of cabinet rank (Lord Dizzy, perhaps?) to have the authority to stop spending departments wasting countless billions of pounds on failed and/or pointless IT projects and enforce streamlined IT throughout government. It has become abundantly clear that most senior politicians and civil servants do not have the first clue about IT (indeed, Blair famously 'boasted' that he had never sent an email) which makes events such as repeated lost data , NHS IT failures, etc not in the least surprising.

The government's ridiculous ID card scheme should have been strangled at birth for the simple reason that it will never work. (never mind the fundamental philosophical objections) The people working on the scheme know that it will never work, that a spectacular breach of the database is inevitable, that the 'unforgeable' cards will be faked etc. but are cheerfully working away billing as much as possible before the incoming Conservatlve government cancels the project at huge further expense. The only people with any confidence in it are the politicians signing the eye-watering cheques.

I shudder to think at how much public money has been utterly wasted over the past fifty years on technological projects by governments of either stripe because no one has had the authority to stand up to the PM and say that an idea is rubbish and can never and will never work and will inevitable be abandoned after billions have been spent.

There's no need for Dept 2, obviously we need Dept's 2 to 6, but turning to the last four ...

Department of Health & Social Services - there's Public Health (part of immigration policy, law and order) and there are subsidies for merit goods, i.e. health vouchers. All the Health Dept needs is a chap or three to grind the figures of what the basic price for various medical procedures are, based in turn on what price competing clinics and hospitals charge, and to decide how much toward this the taxpayer should contribute. Patients will then either take the basic free-at-point-of-use treatment, or top this up with private medical insurance; their own savings; or charitable donations.

Department of Social Security (handling welfare and pensions). Again, it will need a few dozen bods and a big computer to process Citizen's Income or Citizen's Pension payments, and a small fraction of those currently employed in DWP (115,000, from memory) to root out fraudsters.

Department of Education. This will require an executive decision on how much Schools Vouchers will be for different stages of education, half a dozen bods to run the computer processing the standing orders and a few hundred to track down false claims (they can match up claims for vouchers with claims for child-rate Citizen's Income, attendance records etc).

Department of Infrastructure (overseeing energy and transport). Each local council or country council (depending on how major the infrastructure is) will employ a crack team of land valuers who work out whether that particular thing will increase land values or not. E.g. airports - should be built privately of course - but they simultaneously depress land values (aircraft noise, more congestion on local trains) and increase land values (more jobs etc in area round the airport). The land valuers will tot up the potential receipts from auctioning off landing slots plus additional land value tax minus reduction in land value tax and make a decision on whether the project should go ahead.

Obviously that last bit only makes sense if we replace all existing property related taxes (Council Tax, Business Rates, Stamp Duty Land Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Inheritance Tax etc etc) with Land Value Tax, but hey.

One change I'd make is splitting the MOD back into War office and Admiralty so budgets can be set realsitically based on needs, not giving each service a third of the pie as happens now. (I'd also break up the RAF and split its aircraft and personnel between the Army and Navy)

Oops. I meant to start off with "There's no need for Dept 1".