There are some obvious areas of spending to remove.
1.Begin by abolishing the whole ID cards scheme.
2.Stop the centralising computer contracts that have been so badly managed.
3.Abolish unelected regional government in England.
4.Abolish the targets and circulars bureaucracies that ensnare local goverment.
5.Have a couple of years off from legislating more regulation
6.Put through a repeal act, cutting out less desirable or ineffective regulation, so fewer regulators can concentrate on the things that matter.
7. Sell off parts of the banks to cut risk and raise cash
8. Stop all free newsheets and PR materials from government departments for a year
9. Cut the number of Ministers by 10%, reallocating responsibilities to raise their productivity.
10. Cancel all Ministerial and senior official fact finding and non essential visits abroad.

There are some general spending disciplines that need to be introduced into every government department and quango.

1. Place a freeze on all outside recruitment, save in front line roles like teachers, nurses, doctors and service personnel. Seek to appoint from within, and reduce the number of administrative posts each time someone leaves.
2. Place a freeze on new outside consultancy contracts, requiring a senior Minister to consider the case for such work and to sign off on it in exceptional cases where in house staff cannot manage the task.
3. Review all procurement, with a view to buying better.
4. Run down in house stocks which are often large and badly managed. Go over to something closer to a just in time principle for supply.
5. Close all public sector pension schemes to new staff and set up defined contribution schemes instead.
6. Set cost down targets for every sub department and quango.
7. Review corporate plans of all quangos at Ministerial level with a view to identifying substantial cost savings
8. Raise quality targets. Error rates in government are very high, leading to too many expensive complaints and to the need to do things twice.
9. Rationalise building use, shedding surplus space as the staff reductions from natural wastage kick in.
10. Rationalise transport use, which at the moment is wasteful and often not co-ordinated between users.

I have some advice for the government. Instead of declaring war on parents trying to play the system, reform the rotten system. This would not happen if there were enough places at good schools in each County or unitary Council area. Whilst I of course do not condone misrepresentation or fraud, I think the right punishment for anyone found guilty of it should be loss of the favoured place and a place at a poor school, not a term in prison. There needs to be some sense of proportion.

We pay lots of tax to have education departments which serve those with children well. Those departments should be trying to ensure that all parents have a school of their choice, not seeking to enforce complex catchment rules to ration scarce good places in a way which comes down heavily on the disappointed. We need schools departments dedicated to creating more good schools, and more places at good schools.

The very system encourages people to be selective with the truth. You are unlikely to get a place at a good school from outside its catchment by saying you want your child to go to School A because it has better exam marks than School B. Arguments have to be constructed around issues like school transport, single sex education, where other family members go and what the specialism of the school might be. I have met a good few caring and sensible parents in my time, desperate for their child to go to School A. I always support their applications, whilst of course advising them to put the best truthful case forward that they can muster. I want a system which allows more parents to get their first choice, not a system which seeks to criminalise them if they get the application form wrong by mistake, or even if they dress up their answers a bit because it is so important to them.

All of us in the public sector should remember who pays the wages. PUblic servants are here to serve the public, not to create ever more complicated and unsatisfactory systems so they can prosecute more people who fall foul of them.

I suspect the UK and EU governments decided to use this diplomatic spat between the UK and Iran as an opportuntiy to arrange some favourable publicity for concerted EU action. I note that the action does not run to other EU countries breaking off diplomatic relations with Iran or doing more than telling Iran they do not approve. Doubtless the UK governemnt is smarting from the strong showing of anti EU government votes in the recent European elections, and thinks us hearing the President of France talking of solidarity will win us all over to Lisbon and yet more powers for the EU. Dream on. The more we hear of EU politicians seeking to take our right to self government away, the more we will vote against EU government.

This is the same Chancellor who allowed a near £10 m pay and bonus package for the CEO of RBS, a bank where he represents the controlling shareholders!

This speech is almost as good as his “moral hazard” speech in 2007, saying the government would not bail out bad banks. I remember being very critical of that at the time. This is another corker.

Readers of this site will not be surprised that the real economy is still struggling. In this recession in the US and the UK industrial companies have been much quicker to cut employment costs. Some have done this by agreeing unpaid leave, temporary factory closures and short time weeks. Others are simply firing many people, deciding there is too much capacity and wanting to get rid of the costs before they bring the whole enterprise down. Expect more job losses on the both sides of the Atlantic, as the green shoots do not extend to a significant upturn in industrial orders yet.

In the UK we should expect two things. They will wish to strengthen the Tripartite system rather than replace it. Instead of transferring FSA powers over banks to the Bank of England, and giving the Bank a unified command over bank supervision and the money markets they use, both the Bank and the FSA will be given bigger roles in regulating banks.

There is unlikely to be a Glass Steagall law requiring the separation of investment banking from clearing bank activities. The authorities rightly understand that some of the weakest banks in the last crisis were either traditional mortgage banks like Northern Rock, or specialist investment banks like Lehmans. The large conglomerate banks got sucked in to the crisis at a later stage.

Instead they think they will increase the capital and cash requirements of both investment banking and traditional banking activities, probably being tougher on the former. This will limit the capacity of any large bank to do more of both and force choices about priorities to use the capital. It will also mean slower growth for the economy, and more difficulty in getting out of the slump, as it constrains bank balance sheet growth and therefore limits the amount of money in circulation. The regulatory policy is currently pushing against the monetary easing policy announced.

They will continue to devote a lot of effort to micro regulation – seeking to regulate each transaction and customer relationship – as well as putting more emphasis on high level or system regulation. Before and during the crisis the authorities had the powers necessary to demand more cash and capital but failed to do so. It was not a lack of power, but a lack of judgement which led them to permit the excessive build up of debt and books of financial instruments which characterised the period 2003-7.

We need to ask will they be any better next time round? The issue is do the regulators have a leader or top officials with both the judgement and the confidence to use that judgement to control bank balance sheets sensibly? It does not require more people or new armies of number crunchers. You can do it by just examining the balance sheets of the top half a dozen UK based large banks. Any annual reading of those between 2000 and 2007 should have told the informed reader that leverage was getting out of control. In say 2005 the regulators should have asked banks to raise more capital, keep more cash, or rein in their lending levels.

Today the regulators should not be raising their demands for cash and capital immediately. They should give the banks time to adjust their balance sheets, sort out their past bad debts and get their costs under control. The central Bank should be prepared to act as lender of last resort to ensure all the main banks have access to cash should they need it. The time to demand more cash and capital will come when we see money growth and bank balance sheet growth spurting ahead again. Instead of hiring a new army of regulators and inventing a new sequence of regulations, we just need one or two people at the top of the system with judgement and confidence. They already have quite enough power to do the job. The worry is the West will hinder its recovery with too much inappropriate regulation, leaving the field more open for eastern competitors. We should also expect continued policy lurches, as the authorities have still not restored normality to interest rates, money markets or banking.

This is the second franchise that has gone wrong, implying the government’s system for letting these contracts is bad. Taxpayers have had to spend a lot of money on contract negotiation and due diligence on the companies taking them out. There won’t be any explanation or rebates on all that wasted money.

According to the Commons Minister (who simply read out his boss’s statement from the Lords, including referring to his audience as lordships) all will be well. He told us the company is profitable, that taxpayers will enjoy a period of the revenues from the franchise before selling it off again to another private sector company. There was no recognition of what a financial body blow this is to his railways budget. Once again we have a government rushing to nationalise something they clearly do not understand, which will turn out to be a worse financial deal than they let on. There was no sign yesterday of any controlling mind amongst Ministers who knows how to make this proposal work.

What should they have done? They should have taken more security and negotiated a tighter deal when they set up the franchise in the first place. They should have spent more time seeing what the relative cost of dealing with the existing franchise holder would be compared with taking it in house. I am not persuaded they did the homework or came up with the best answer for taxpayers. Given that they signed a bad contract originally, they should have spent more time examining all the options to mitigate their losses. Yesterday’s statement looked like a fit of pique allied to playing to the nationalising gallery.

Sadiq Khan was dragged to the House around 8pm to tell us about the nationalisation of the East coast mainline rail franchise, which everyone else had heard about hours before on the media. I asked him how much money the taxpayer would have to put in as share capital and working capital to set up the nationalised company that would run the service. There was of course no answer, as Ministers apparently have gone ahead with their plan to do this without working out the numbers and the money at risk. As always, they only do soundbites.,

Sarah McCarthy Fry, a junior Treasury Minister, completed the trio by being unwilling or unable to answer basic questions about how their new scheme to encourage saving for people on benefit and low income would work.

The centre piece of the Bill is the establishment of a new quango to design and administer the expenses and allowances system - the very same system Kelly has been asked to redesign as well. We were told the rushed Bill can always be amended later in the year if Kelly disagrees!

I asked what consultations the government has held with the Fees office staff who currently do this work. No answer.

I asked if staff in the present Fees office will be automatically transferred to the new quango (under TUPE). No answer.

I asked if staff will lose their jobs and have to compete for new jobs at the new quango. No answer.

I asked how much extra the new quango would cost compared with the current arrangements. I was told it would cost the same. I find that difficult to understand, given the costs of set up and the likely high salaries that will be offered to the Heads of the new body.

We need a less generous system of allowances. I suspect we now have one, after the changes made in recent weeks. It just needs summarising and approving.

We need tighter administation of the new system. That can be delivered by clear instructions from Parliament to a suitable senior employee, who should be responsible for systems that ensure proper approval and documentation of claims.

None of this requires an elaborate new structure. A good employer embarking on such an upheaval would consult with the exisiting staff first, hear their views, and would seek to minimise disruption and redundancy cost.

This bull in a china shop approach is likely to produce more problems, not less. This government has been keen to pass lots of labour laws for the private sector. Don’t any of the rules apply to them as employers?

Worse still, the biggest decline by far has been in manufacturing. The government sector has continued to grow - on borrowed money - and private sector services have been patchy. The biggest hit has been taken once again by those who make things. This is the very opposite of what the PM always said he wanted.

Two of the weakest sectors have been new housebuilding and car manufacture. The government has sought to encourage the former throughout its life, but has been most unsuccessful. It has sought to tax the car into oblivion for much of its period in office, only to offer some offsetting cash breaks once the crisis in motor manufacturing was painfully clear.

The irony of the government’s strategy of subsidising banks, spending more in the public sector, whilst regulating and taxing private industry more has been to lead to relatively much more unemployment in the industrial sector than elsewhere. The legacy of the distorted economic policy will be more closed factories and more retreats from making things in the UK.

On The Today programme on Monday morning Mr Mandelson said that there could be reductions in the budgets of Transport and the Home Office. Later briefing told us the cuts were to come in the Communities and Local Government department.

As some of you have pointed out, none of this should come as a surprise. The announcement on new homes may be spin, and may not result in the extra “planned” spending any time soon. Alternatively, there could be extra spending and the increase will be lost amidst the giddy escalation of the deficit. Why worry about £1500 m you might ask when they are printing £125 billion?

So why do I go on about it? Because at some point government in this country has to get some discipline into public spending. The rules are simple. If the government wishes to spend more on something, it has to spend less on something else. That requires two decisions which need to be reported to Parliament. You shouldn’t just report the increase without reporting the decrease as well and in the same amount of detail. Or if the government wishes to increase its borrowing stilll further we need to be told that and debate the wisdom of yet more on the never never.

The government is in disarray over whether to have a “Comprehensive” Spending review or not. We are due one, and were promised one. Mr Mandelson yesterday told us the Chancellor had decided against one. When MPs sought confirmation of this in the Commons yesterday the Prime Minister told us it was a “matter for the Chancellor”. As the Chancellor was on the front bench at the time, it would have been an easy task for the PM to ask Mr Darling what his decision was.

Constitutionally, something as important as a thorough review of spending and future budget levels should be a matter for the whole cabinet, a decision taken by them under the chairmanship of the PM on the advice of the Chancellor. Under the rules of collective government, even if a spending review is the Chancellor’s sole decision, any Minister should know the Chancellor’s answer and give it when asked.

I can only conclude they are having a big row about shelving a spending review. The argument that all their economic forecasts are likely to be wrong so they cannot have one is bizarre. The Treasury has often made wrong forecasts in the past but has still recognised the need to set out how much it plans to spend and borrow. It is especially important to guide markets on this issue today, given the high level of the deficit. If markets think this government do not care how large the deficit is after 2010 it will make raising the money they need even more difficult.

The full text of John’s submission to Wokingham Borough Council now follows:

“I am writing to oppose the imposition of new car parking charges and meters in Wokingham.

I understand this has emerged form a Councillor led initiative to reduce costs. This proposal, far from reducing costs, will increase them sharply. It requires substantial capital investment in meters and supporting systems, and will entail substantial annual expenditure on servicing the meters, running the payment and supervision systems and collecting the cash. I fully support reductions in costs and overheads. A suitable start would be to stop proposals and consultations like this, which must be costly to produce.

The case against higher and more parking charges is very simple. The town centre of Wokingham has been weakened by the delay of the developer in implementing the planning application granted to him to renovate and improve the town centre, and by the subsequent delay in finding an alternative way forward to improve the shops. There are some good shops and hard working shop keepers in the town, but the empty shops and blank frontage especially in Peach Street detracts from the total retail offer. Wokingham also faces stiff competition from Reading, the Meadows and other neighbouring centres.

In this situation Wokingham can still offer something the larger centres cannot offer – shorter journeys and easier access to shops. Most people will come to shop in Wokingham by car. We need to make them feel welcome, and provide free or low cost parking which is easy to use.

I have in the past urged the Council to make its own extensive car park available free to Saturday shoppers. I think now we need to go further, and to offer free parking for the first couple of hours for shoppers using a couple of the town centre Council owned parks, with a rebate offered through town centre shops participating in the scheme.

The last thing we need is intrusive meters on streets, with a new army of traffic wardens enforcing the rules. Not only will it be dearer for shoppers, but it will change the atmosphere, making people less inclined to come. We need a more welcoming town, not a less welcoming one.”

After 10 years of throwing huge sums of money at the public sector, and claiming this proves things are getting better, there are huge areas of waste, incompetence and over spending. Reading through the salaries of the BBC top executives, it is impossible to say that the top of the public sector understands the need for cost control, value for money or even still operates on the basis of “public service values”. What is true of the BBC is true of many quangos and Whitehall departments, of Town Halls and nationalised companies. The pay of the nationalised bankers is still based on the assumption that these are highly competitive businesses making good profits, with senior people at risk of losing their jobs. Instead they are now subsidised state employees. The pay of so called Chief Executives in local government is modelled on private sector CEOs who have to bring in the business and the revenue or else lose their posts, when Council CEOs just put the tax up and send people to prison if they don’t pay.

Labour should remind their overbloated public sector that it is meant to believe in public service values. They should ask all public sector employees earning more than the Prime Minister to take their pay down to his level of remuneration until they have got their organisations under financial control in a way which produces a realistic level of overall national budget defcit. They should all be set targets to make a quantum improvement in quality, efficiency and cash conservation. When was the public sector last asked to cut its stocks? When was it last given productivity targets that drove real progress?

This would be good news indeed. Selling a minority stake in current markets to a foreign company was always going to be a rip off deal at the expense of the taxpayer. Adding to it nationalising the very expensive and deficit ridden pension scheme made this government proposal yet another part of their scorched earth approach to the public finances. It would strip out assets at low prices and increase liabilities so the next government faces an even more impossible task to bring the public sector into balance.

Any new government serious about curbing the deficit will need to sell a majority of the Royal Mail and transfer responsibility for the pension fund to the private sector. It would be well advised to encourage and allow a substantial employee participation, as this is a people business where we need the saff to be well motivated to deliver a good service. The current position of a poorly managed Royal Mail starved of capital to grow, modernise and change the busienss is not a good one. Making the Royal Mail the creature of a foreign owner who controlled a blocking stake but did not own a majority would be even worse, leaving the taxpayer with the main liabilities and offering taxpayers a low share price for the stake. A foreign buyer of such a shareholding might well be more interested in blocking a competitior from full takeover, and in running down those parts of the business were they had spare capacity to take up the slack.

This is a rare case of the government deciding against making the public finances worse. At least it leaves the problem for someone else to sort out, instead of doing another bad financial deal at our expense.

It leaves open the quesiton of why, after 12 years of large increases in cash for inner city and poorer performing schools are so many young people still in need of this extra teaching? What has gone wrong with Labour’s target driven top down system? Where has all the money gone that they have spent so far?

The government itself now says it wishes to end the top down system, and give more power to individual schools, Heads and senior teachers. This has been the Opposition’s song for years. Apparently the time for targets has passed, and the time for devolution has arrived.

The government has found some more money for this project - in other words it is going to borrow more. Given the size of the budget deficit, shouldn’t it be identifying items of spending elsewhere that are less desirable than this teaching project? Why doesn’t it listen to to the Commons, voting against more regional government this week, and make some economies there? If it can now see how unpopular its top down bureaucracy in education is, why can’t it see how more unpopular its heavy handed regional bureaucracy is in England? Why does it want to balkanise England?

The first sessions concentrated on how Obama had made a difference. Instead of forensic academic analysis which I was expecting, most of the contributions told of Obama saving the world, saving the planet and creating permanent peace. There was no hint of criticism. Obama walks on water.

We were also treated to a view from Europe, which assumed that all in the UK and elsewhere in Europe were happy with a royal “we” as citizens of the European Union. The thesis was an amusing one. Under Bush, the EU apparently had been a force for consensus, peaceful and negotiated solutions worldwide and the exercise of soft power all wrapped up in smug moral superiority. The advent of Obama has apparently made this more difficult, presumably because he now does all of the above.

When I had a go, I felt like a fox in the duck coop, dealing with so many canards. The replies were predictable:

Obama - carrying on detention without trial at Guantanamo - “He wants to close it down but it is difficult”
Obama - creating new prisons in Afhghanistan to extend detention without trial - no answer
Obama - intensifying the war in Afghanistan, so US troops are still killing Arabs — “His speech showed he wishes to get on well with the Muslim world”
Obama - promised to save the motor industry - and the planet from climate change - is doing neither - answer “He is doing his best ”
EU - why do you think there is a demos, a people, where we can say “We”? - couldn’t concieve of such a question
EU - Why does the EU position on many world issues matter? - accepted that EU was not very serious about projecting power
EU - is a babble of voices and disjointed economies and nations - this led me into a volley of the predictable, tired and sad old soundbites — “Do you want the Uk to be isolated?” “Do you think the UK can go it alone?” “Do you know how much trade the UK has with the EU?” I was awaiting the usual 3 million jobs, but they did at least give that a miss.
I get fed up with constantly having to point out that international trade is now mainly regulated by GATT and global agreement, that Germany will want to sell her BMWs to the UK even if we do take a different line on EU government, and that the UK has had practically no influence for years in the EU, just going along with the prevailing bureaucratic and Franco-German consensus.

Surely by now we can have some proper analysis of the extent and reasons for Euroscepticism, the fact that trade is now dependent on global agreement on tariffs and terms, that you can work together with other nations through NATO, the UN and European institutions without having common government, and that the top down bureaucratic centralised model is out of date as well as irksome and adding to our economic woes?

There seemed little grasp of the mood of the British people, and no comment on the recent European elections, which showed enormous ennui, allied to strong Euroscepticism on the part of many of those bothering to vote.

My main job is to hold the government to account. It is to cross examine them over their policies, to request they put things right that government has got wrong, to seek improvements to public services, to expose waste and maladministration, to criticise, amend and improve their laws, to approve or vote against their budgets.

I am not allowed to hold the government to account in Parliament on Saturday or Sunday, as we do not meet, or on Fridays when only meet to consider private members business. Parliament is closed completely for 17 weeks of the year. In July we will be told we have to stay away until the second week of October!

That means, in total, we can only do our prime jobs for 140 days of the year. It is a part time Parliament. It is all part of this governement’s wasteful and ineffective public sector. No surviving private sector enterprise would be as overmanned as Parliament, and no successful company would work its key personnel as little.

Labour say an MP has work to do when their Parliament locks us out. Yes, it’s true there are still cases of take up and emails to answer. There are people and organisations to visit. In the long summer recess, however, all the schools are closed. Now the Health Service has been organised around large regional hospitals each MP has either just one or none to visit. Without Parliament in session it is not a full time job.

Some people think an MP should be a kind of ersatz or para Councillor. Councillors elected to the job do not take kindly to an MP trying to second guess their every move. If Labour wants us to be effective para locals, then we need powers to call in decisions, overturn planning or school allocation choices, or have some control over local executives and their budgets. No-one is proposing that, for the good reason that we elect Councillors and pay their bills to carry out just those tasks. Of course good MPs promise to take matters up with the Council when constituents are frustrated, but we have to explain we have no power to put things right or to change things for the better. In local matters we are just another lobbyist.

Providing value for the taxpayer has to be the theme of the next few years, as we battle the bulge in public spending and borrowing. We need fewer MPs, and Parliament needs to meet more often. It does not need to legislate more - indeed, legislating less would be welcome. It needs instead to spend more time going through budgets and programmes line by line, helping public sector executives root out waste and improve quality and efficiency.

Each motion proposed a Regional Grand Commmittee for a different part of the country should hold a meeting in the specified region to discuss that region’s response to the economic downturn. The votes recorded were as follows:

4.16pm South West 114 for, 105 against
4.27pm East Midlands 98 for, 104 against (government defeat)
4.38 pm South East 112 for, 105 against
4.49pm Yorkshire 118 for, 110 against
5.01pm East of England 120 for, 105 against
5.12pm North West 120 for, 105 against
5.23pm North East 121 for, 100 against
5.32pm West Midlands 124 for, 99 against.

The only time I have had a second job which really stretched me as well as being an MP was when I was a Minister. Ministerial life makes many more demands on time than a non executive directorship, and often makes demands on time when Parliament is in session. No-one is suggesting in the national media that MPs should be banned from Minsiterial office, so in practise most agree you can do another job as well as being an MP.

For those who are interested, the Register of Members interest records 3 companies with which I am connected.

I am a member of the Advisory Board of Intelligent Engineering Holdings. No meetings are scheduled and no payments are being made.

I am non executive Chairman of Concentric PLC, now part of the Haldex Group. I chair a monthly divisional Board which takes the form of an international phone meeting, involving the USA, China, India, Germany and Sweden. I undertake special projects for the Group at mutually convenient times when Parliament is not meeting. The business is in automotive engineering.

I am Chairman of Evercore Pan Asset, an investment advisory business. In 2007 when I took it on I drew no salary, undertook light duties, and became a minority shareholder. Late in 2008 the founder CEO died suddenly. I have agreed a contract to offer the company strategic advice on global investment, and write a twice weekly economic and investment summary on the main world markets, concentrating on US/EU/China and India for them. I also chair the Board and attend meetings. The contract states that there are no formal hours of work and my Parliamentary duties take precedence.

I will make the necessary declarations of income as required when I receive payments from these two activities. The EPA contract allows me to pay the costs of the second home I need to undertake my Parliamentary duties without recourse to expenses.