Cut these greedy pen pushers and free the nation

Endemic waste and mismanagement have almost bankrupted the public finances.

As the former Chief Secretary Liam Byrne breezily confess ed on his departure from the Treasury last month after his party’s long reign of profligacy: “There’s no money left.”

A key part of this spendthrift culture was Labour’s addiction to bureaucracy. Remorseless expansion of the state machine was elevated into a principleof governance. Organisational growth was seen as the solution to every problem.

The mania for institutional tinkering led to a proliferation of new quangos and managerial empires, all of them swallowing ever greater sums of taxpayers’ money to justify their own existences and give the illusion of action.

The obsession with bureaucracy is one of the reasons public expenditure has been so disastrously out of control.

Under Labour, the state payroll grew to reach 7.5 million employees, while an arrogant public sector elite came into being, full of jargon-spouting, self-serving pen pushers on obscene salaries. No aristocrats of the past exploited the public with the kind of grasping ruthlessness displayed by Labour’s breed of greedy executives.

There are now more than 800 state officials on over £150,000 a year, many of them doing routine jobs for which no special talent is required. This is the extravagant world that the new coalition Government must tackle if the deficit is to be reduced and sanity restored to the public finances.

But, for all the fashionable wailing about the “pain” of cuts, especially from the public sector trade unions, the truth is that Britain would gain enormously from a vigorous assault on state bureaucracy which is choking the life out of our nation.

Businesses and individuals would be freed. Taxes could go down. With officialdom in retreat, there would even be more money to put into frontline services like classrooms and hospitals. The coalition could make a start by reducing the size of the gargantuan Whitehall Civil Service, made up of more than 530,000 administrators.

Even a modest initial reduction of just 10 per cent in this workforce would save the Treasury £1.2billion a year, though the scope for long-term savings is far greater.

The endless tiers of management in the NHS, local government and education provide another large area for cuts. In the last two years alone, spending on management salaries and the NHS’s Primary Care Trusts has shot up by no less than 25 per cent, this at a time when the private sector was enduring pay freezes and redundancies because of the recession.

Too much public sector recruitment is nothing more than an employment racket for over-paid bureaucrats. Only this month, for instance, Barnet Council in North London has advertised for three assistant directors on salaries totalling over £300,000, while Brighton and Hove Council is to hire four new “strategic directors” on £125,000.

Arguably even the cuts exercise can be turned into another excuse for more prodigality. At Suffolk County Council, the £220,000-a-year chief executive Andrea Hill is spending £122,000 on consultants to advise on how to save money.

The quango state built by Labour is also ripe for the axe. The quangos spend more than £120billion a year and employ 700,000 staff, yet so much of their activity is of no benefit to the taxpayers who have to fork out for all this self-indulgence.

Outside the politically correct cocoon of metropolitan elitism no one would miss the £70million a year Equality and Human Rights Commission if it were abolished tomorrow. The shambles of further education is typical of the bureaucratic mess produced by quangos.

Last year, the Labour Government admitted that the £12billion Learning and Skills Council (LSC) had failed so badly that it would have to go. Yet, far from reducing the burden of officialdom, Labour decided to create two new bodies in its place: the Skills Funding Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency. No less than £42million was spent on the launch of these outfits which have been entirely staffed from the failed LSC and are certain to be just as useless.

The network of £1.7billion a year Regional Development Agencies is almost a microcosm of everything that is wrong with bureaucratic Britain.