SPENDING MUST BE SCRUTINISED AND CHALLENGED AS NEVER BEFORE
October 29, 2009 6:00 AM
In North Devon Journal
In North Devon Journal
Public finances are going to remain under serious pressure for several years. This will make for lively political debate as priorities will be scrutinised and challenged more than ever before.
This week the Ministry of Defence has been under the cosh for slashing training for the Territorial Army. It has pleaded that money problems mean it has to make "tough choices". But it is an amazing decision: the TA has been called upon more and more in recent years and its members have found themselves sent to the front line in Iraq and Afghanistan on a totally unexpected level.
Tony Blair cheerfully sent British troops into both those wars without ever making proper financial provision and the TA has been an important bit of sticky tape keeping the army going. Whatever else they cut, one would have thought that the emergency repair kit was beyond reach.
Priorities elsewhere are being challenged. A big reorganisation of our local drug treatment and support services runs a risk of diminishing what is available. This could have serious impacts in our community well beyond those immediately involved.
Elsewhere money is being spent which frankly raises people's eyebrows. Bridges are being built at public expense in Cornwall to help bats find their way around. A model iceberg is going to be towed around the south west coastline promoting the 2012 Olympics. The Learning & Skills Council, having blundered catastrophically over its college buildings programme, and again on a smaller but significant scale over A levels, has paid for marketing whizz kids to dream up the bizarre name "Petroc" for the combined North and East Devon colleges.
There may possibly be good cases for each of these. My point is simply that in the spending climate we face for the foreseeable, people taking those taking decisions will be called on to justify how they spend public money more than they have been accustomed to.
And it is not just recent or current spending that will be under the spotlight. Things like the "baby bond" which puts money aside at birth for people to spend when they turn 18 must also be called into question as a curious priority.
Huge sums of public money went into the banks at their time of crisis, and hopefully in the fullness of time the taxpayer may get much of it back. But in the meantime it would be galling to see the return of huge bonuses.
Things will get back to some sort normality and stability in time. But until they do, it is right for debate about how we use scarce resources to be robust.
What would you like to do next?
-
Subscribe for updates
Follow the party's activity on...
- Twitter:
- Liberal Democrats
- Facebook:
- Liberal Democrats
- YouTube:
- Liberal Democrats