Pre-Budget Report

My hon. Friend on the Front Bench makes a valid point—the country might have been holding together, but the Government clearly are not. However, let me address directly the hon. Lady's serious and important point. I do not want to return to the previous speaker and to re-fight the battles of the '80s, but my point is that the Keynesians argued that that consolidation of the budget deficit would intensify the recession and they were proved wrong. That is the simple point that I want to put across. The economy, far from going into a deeper recession, began a strong and prolonged recovery. Perhaps the hon. Lady can think of other ways in which that recovery could have been made even greater and stronger, but she has not pointed out what they might be and nor has anybody else I know. I want to allow other people to take part in the debate, because I want to hear what they have to say. How do we cut expenditure? We want to cut expenditure in ways that do not throw people out of work and that do not undermine public services. We have to recognise that we have one of the most expensive public sectors in the EU. It is heading for, and is set to reach, more than half of our GDP. Moreover, one of the biggest impacts within the sector has been the increase in the pay budget. I draw the House's attention to a study produced just a few days ago by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, which gives all the facts and figures and says that if the public sector pay bill had risen in line with the private sector pay bill over the past two years, then taxes, or borrowing, could have been £11 billion lower. One of the main agents of the growth in the deficit has been the fact that the public sector pay bill has been out of control in the past couple of years. It must be brought back under control in the interests both of controlling the deficit and of reducing the impact on jobs in the public sector. We do not want to lose a single job if we can help it, if those jobs are valid or if people can be moved to do something more useful. We must learn to say no to new ideas—that probably applies as much to Opposition parties as to the Labour party—and we must not be in the business of adding to our spending commitments. We must also learn from the private sector the lessons of lean production and how constantly to improve the value for money that one gets from any given number of people. The way to do that is not through top-down statements that we are going to change it all through a few edicts from some great man, even though we can recruit some great experts in efficiency. Ultimately, it means doing in each Department what I started to do in my Department—the Department for Social Security—and asking people at the sharp end of the Department how they could do their job more efficiently. It was quite difficult to get my managers to do that. They came back and told me that they had spoken to the area managers. I said, "I didn't ask you to do that. I want you to speak to the people who actually fill in income support claims, or who help to monitor invalidity benefit claims, and ask them how they could do their job better." No one had asked those staff that before, and they came up with an enormous range of sensible ideas for improving efficiency. The target was to improve efficiency by 25 per cent.—in other words, to reduce the number of jobs by 25 per cent.—but they participated in the exercise because no one had ever asked them before how they could do their job more effectively. They knew that they were doing lots of things in very inefficient ways, and they wanted to do them better. Most people in the public sector want to do their job better and have the public interest at heart. We must do that at the micro level, through every Department, to harness the experience and expertise of the people at the sharp end of each Department.