The Spending Plan, courage, and politicians
A ring-fenced National Health Service, a bill poised to commit future governments to spend 0.7% of GNI on international aid, a triple lock on pensions, senior military figures pushing for commitments to higher defence spending: these are inauspicious times in which to contemplate cutting the UK’s £77 billion structural budget deficit, but contemplate we must. Aside from the velleities and equivocations of the political parties when it comes to their respective deficit reduction plans (and most other things besides), the Taxpayers’ Alliance has today released their Spending Plan, which comes as a substantial contribution to the debate. The Spending Plan’s first goal is modest: to lay out a menu of cuts which would take public spending to 35.2% of GDP by 2019-20 – the level forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility – its second more radical, to outline further measures which would cut spending to 31.7% of GDP, a level at which a single income tax of 30% could be implemented.
Despite the reasonableness of its first end point, or perhaps because of it, the Plan makes for sobering reading. An implementation of the first, less stringent, programme would, among other things, see the abolition of no less than three government departments (the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; for Culture, Media and Sport; and of Energy and Climate Change), an end to national pay bargaining in the public sector, and a sizeable cut to Scotland’s grant from the UK government.
While the numbers add up, the issue is likely to arise in finding a politician willing to implement the proposals. As the TPA’s Chief Executive, Jonathan Isaby, puts it:
Our Spending Plan honestly sets out the savings that need to be made by whichever party or parties take power after the election. Today we challenge our political leaders to accept our plan or to produce a similarly rigorous set of proposals of their own which explain where it is that they would reduce spending instead.
The report recognises that reduced spending and deregulation are of no importance if they don't lead to people being better off in the long run, and makes the welcome case that making the state leaner is desirable for reasons other than deficit reduction. David B. Smith sets out the case that market economies grow faster, while the ASI's Director, Dr. Eamonn Butler, makes the ethical argument for lower taxes.
Despite the size of the challenge that future governments face, that markets have confidence in the UK’s ability to get its debt under control might serve as good evidence that all is, in fact, not lost. However, politicians would do well to come to the realisation that, whether those set out in The Spending Plan or not, radical decisions about the role of the state must be made; we can only hope this research helps them do that.
Local government cuts needn't be the end of the world
Local governments are having their spending power cut by 1.8% in real terms next year. Local councils pay for things like social care, some education, public transport and roads, and some of the arts. So this cut is not so popular in some quarters.
I hate relying on ‘waste cutting’ as a way of making spending cuts, but local councils really do seem to waste a lot of money. Since 2010 they’ve made £10bn in efficiency savings, and a third of councils say they can make bigger savings. I’m sure at least some of the other two-thirds are just being shy. The Local Government Association estimates that local governments can continue making efficiency savings at between 1 and 2 percent per year. So that’s something.
The big spending items are social care and waste spending. Both of these can be reformed so that people who can afford to have to pay for themselves. Waste collection is often contracted out, and there is academic evidence that doing so results in significant cost reductions. (There’s an easy way for councils who do not already do this to save some cash.) But more significantly there’s no real reason that more of the actual payments for this should not be moved to private residents as well, at least those who can afford it.
Social care is much trickier and, as the population gets older and lives for longer, paying for it is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Those people who can afford to pay for their end-of-life care should do so, but there is the problem that this disincentivises saving. Nevertheless it is hard to see a case for people who live in social housing and earn low amounts of money paying for the end-of-life care of people who own the big houses that they live in. Reforming this wouldn’t solve problems in the short run, but it might help stave off a bigger funding problem in the medium run.
Normally everyone focuses in on arts funding. In my view, there is no role for government in arts funding at all. I won’t convince you of this here, but Pete Spence might. And there are all the weird little things that local governments spend their money on that could be cut to save even a tiny bit of money. Where I live, in Lambeth, half the adverts I see seem to be thinly-veiled political campaign posters (paid for by me and my neighbours).
And, funnily enough, there’s one way councils could raise quite a lot of money and solve another problem in the process. The country needs a lot more houses, and planning permission is the main thing standing in the way. In some parts of the country, a piece of agricultural land that gets planning permission rises in value by one hundred times. Councils should be allowed and encouraged to auction off development rights for new houses. That would raise money for them and help tackle the housing shortage.
The problem here is that housing demand is not equal across the country, and it’s the richer places like London and the south east that would benefit the most from this. So there’s probably a case for some minority fraction of the money raised being redistributed to poorer authorities. In general I like the principle of council funding redistribution from rich to poor parts of the country, but that does reduces the incentive for councils to improve the economic prospects of their own areas. Though perhaps they lack the powers to do this anyway.
We have a government deficit that most people want reduced, some very large areas of central government spending that most people want increased (pensions, healthcare), and a general consensus that economic growth is a good thing (so tax rises are out). Something’s gotta give and there is almost nothing that can be cut painlessly. But given some willingness to reform alongside cutting, local government cuts could be the right way to go.
Another exercise in rewriting economic history
It is just so fun watching people rearranging the historical deckchairs to make sure that their tribe looks good and that the tribe of their opponents can be portrayed as those nasty, 'orrible, people over there. And so it is with this latest from Ha Joon Chang:
First, let’s look at the origins of the deficit. Contrary to the Conservative portrayal of it as a spendthrift party, Labour kept the budget in balance averaged over its first six years in office between 1997 and 2002. Between 2003 and 2007 the deficit rose, but at 3.2% of GDP a year it was manageable.
Quite: in those first few years Blair and Brown held to the spending limits that had been suggested by the previous, outgoing, Tory government. On the basis that if anyone thought they were the spendthrift Labour party of old then they wouldn't get elected. So there was, in there, a period of a public sector surplus. It's only after the second election that they ripped up that idea of fiscal restraint and became that Labour party of old again. So "balance" over the six years is actually a couple of years of Tory policy then spend, spend, spend.
And a deficit of 3.2% a year might be manageable: except of course it wasn't, was it? But more importantly it is a grave violation of the precepts of Keynesian economics to be having a deficit of any sort at that point in the economic cycle. If we are to take Keynesian demand management seriously (we don't, but let us do so arguendo) then yes, there should be fiscal expansion in the slumps. But the counterpart to that is that in the boom there should be restraint: a surplus, not a deficit. This is not to pay off the previous debt, it's not to create the borrowing room to provide the firepower for that next slump. It's because demand management means that you temper the booms as well as the busts. Given that the middle part of the Brown/Blair Terror was in fact the tail end of the longest modern peacetime boom then the public accounts should have been healthily in surplus. In order to temper that boom.
Chang is doing an edit to history here, to show that his tribe is better than the other one. Given the circumstances of the time Labour really were sailor-type drunken loons going on a spree with the nation's chequebook and don't let anybody tell you different.