David Cameron could wipe out the Budget deficit at a stroke if he cut government waste, TaxPayers' Alliance warns in report to mark 10 years of the campaign
Britain’s £111 billion budget deficit could be eliminated if the Government curbed “excessive” pay for GPs, stopped “waste” in the NHS and cut spending on “unnecessary” projects, according to an analysis to be published this week.
The TaxPayers’ Alliance, which will publish the figures, claims that cutting excessive pay for state employees, particularly in the health service, and tackling Government waste would save £120 billion annually - the equivalent of £4,553 for every household in the UK.
The study is based on Whitehall accounts, research papers and audit reports and it comes as all three main parties prepare to unveil their plans for managing the public finances after next year’s election.
It suggests that doctors’ pay in particular is an area where Government “waste” could be targeted and more than £1 billion saved for the public purse.
British doctors are among the best paid in the world, the group says, earning 3.4 times the average wage.
Their pay has increased dramatically since the 2004 GP contract was agreed with Labour ministers and hundreds of doctors now earn more than £200,000 a year.
In France, which the World Health Organisation regards as having the best healthcare system in the world, GPs are paid 2.1 times the average wage.
If this were the case in the UK, £1.38 billion would have been saved in 2012-13 in England alone, the TPA said.
The study also identified missed NHS appointments as an example of Government “waste”. Each time a patient misses a hospital appointment in England and Scotland they waste over £100 in NHS resources, costing taxpayers £769,679,700 in total last year, the group’s report said.
The fact that appointments are free means that too many unnecessary bookings are made and there is little sanction for those who do not turn up. Ministers should consider charging patients who fail to attend their appointments, the TPA said.
The study also suggested that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport could be effectively scrapped, and its functions transferred elsewhere, at a saving to the taxpayers £1,063,696,000.
Funding could be maintained for free entry to galleries and museums but thereafter the DCMS should be closed down, the report suggested. “Culture, media and sport existed in Britain long before we had a department for them,” the alliance said.
Its report also identified smaller exmaples of what it claimed was Government “waste”, including more than £520,000 from the loss of a spare part for an anti-aircraft missile system at the Ministry of Defence, and £480,000 theft of humanitarian supplies from the Department for International Development by Al Shabaab militia in Somalia.
The Home Office lost £1,000,000 in legal fees for a case at the Immigration Appeals Tribunal while the Forestry Commission spent £70 on a bunny outfit bought with a taxpayer-funded procurement card.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TPA, said all the major political parties heading into next year’s general election “would have to find those spending cuts”.
“You couldn’t make the case for lower taxes without showing where you would make the spending cuts,” he said.
He also suggested that the Government should scrap HS2, what he described as the “barmy” £50 billion high speed rail project linking London to Birmingham and the north.
“The government haven’t made the case for HS2,” he said. “To be frank, trying to speed up trains is just very 1970s. The government should be positioning us for the future. What we will see for the next decade is driverless cars. How are we preparing for that?
“The idea that shaving 20 minutes off journey times is worth billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is just completely barmy.”
The TPA’s report, named the Bumper Book of Government Waste, will be published in full on Monday.
George Osborne, the Chancellor, has promised to run a Budget surplus by the end of the next parliament, a pledge matched recently by his Labour counterpart, Ed Balls.
Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, meanwhile, will set out the key priorities for the Liberal Democrats in a speech at the Mansion House in London tomorrow (Monday). He is expected to confirm his commitment to a new “mansion tax” on expensive homes and to raising the tax-free personal income allowance to help the lowest paid workers. Wealthy pensioners should also be targeted for any future benefit cuts, before further curbs are placed on payments to the working-age poor, the Lib Dem leader believes.
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