WANTED urgently: hard man/woman at Her Majesty's Treasury. Job description: to make £250 billion a year go much further than it did under Gordon Brown. Position: director of everything that matters. Salary: at least £100,000 a year plus lots of perks, huge prestige and a brilliant view over St James's Park. Starting date: tomorrow, if not sooner.
After a series of gaffes, HM Treasury is overdue for a trip back to basic training with a merciless drill sergeant from the private sector. The brief would be to put the government's biggest department through boot camp.
The chosen person should consider a billion pounds to be quite a lot of money. He or she should not be intimidated by mandarins, his/her predecessor Alistair Darling or anybody else. They should spend a good part of the day talking to ordinary people who are not civil servants, as well as having the gumption to stress-test brilliant ideas like the non-doms' tax grab in the wider world before trying to write them into law.
And, oh yes, it would be helpful if he made sure that somebody took responsibility for specific tasks such as the grand plan to reduce business red tape, which has got nowhere in 10 years.
It has become clear that the Treasury needs a spring-clean. The chancellor's partial climbdown on the non-doms tax proposals is just the latest example of its need for a general refit.
It took a warning from Sir Digby Jones, former director of the Confederation of British Industry, about the damage the non-doms scheme would cause the City for so little gain. Sir Digby's alert told the Treasury what it should have known already.
Just before the retreat on non-doms came January's rethink of the capital gains tax on entrepreneurs, following ferocious lobbying by business. The tax was "not universally popular", the chancellor observed. Make that 99% against.
As it happens, highly respected organisations such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies thought it was not such a bad tax, but what alarmed experts was the "completely shambolic" way, as one told the Sunday Herald, that tax policy is conducted in the Treasury. Contrary to most reports, the non-doms tax was years in the planning. However, it was rushed out under Darling, presumably in reply to the Conservatives' own similar proposals. "It gives an impression of tax uncertainty," pointed out one expert.
Then there is the alarming overshoot in the public finances, which at its present rate suggests a 27%-plus increase in spending in the six months to March. This means the chancellor has no hope of observing the Treasury's own golden rule of borrowing, enshrined by Gordon Brown. By most estimates Treasury forecasts over the past four years have proven far too optimistic, and it should have cut borrowing as early as 2003.
Perhaps the present chancellor believes his own speechwriters. Darling likes to say, as he did in February, that the British economy has proved "more resilient than any of the major advanced nations to the shocks of the past decade". This is a big statement, to put it mildly. Most informed people could name at least half a dozen others that have proved at least as healthy. And if some OECD economies have not grown quite as fast or for as long as Britain, that might just be because they sensibly reined in their borrowing sooner than us. Has the Treasury been giving bad advice to its chancellors, or did the orders come from the top?
In general the Treasury gives the appearance of being far too close to the financial sector, too arrogantly introverted and too bureaucratic. It needs to get out more. Just one result is that it sometimes forgets that manufacturing earns £150 billion a year and would very much appreciate a lighter regulatory burden.
We are now into our fourth generation of a "determination" to reduce the burden of compliance on industry. The latest version is known, in Orwellian-speak, as the Administrative Burdens Reduction Programme, and its purpose is to "improve the UK business environment by ensuring that regulation is used only when necessary". This is no small matter - there is a £16bn boost in gross domestic product up for grabs here, according to the Treasury's own figures.
Yet we have heard this since the late 1990s, and it should have happened much earlier. For all its vastness and resources, the Treasury lacks follow-through.
But now things have to change in the new era of belt-tightening that even the Treasury expects to hit us over the next two years or so. As it happens, the department really is looking for a hard man/woman. Their job really will be to knock it into shape in an environment dominated by "a reduction in the level of growth in public spending". Indeed, the surviving candidates meet the selection panel tomorrow and Tuesday.
While the job description is couched in typical public service-speak ("take ownership of outputs and deliverables", "expertly influence and enthuse people throughout the organisation", etc), there is clearly a bottom line hidden in the gobbledegook. The new Director of Public Services, to give the job its proper title, is expected to get value for money in a whole raft of big-spending government programmes.
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