Earlier this week, the Treasury announced that they are going to hold a consultation on forthcoming spending cuts as part of a review that will set spending plans for the rest of this Parliament. Some people are cynical about this exercise, and it might just be a PR exercise, as former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson suggests. But if we turn our nose up at chances to tell the politicians what we want, then we'll never get a greater voice in these kinds of important decisions.
Further details of how to get involved are apparently still to come, but you can e-mail the Treasury here.
Special interests might use this consultation as a chance to try and stop important cuts in spending that does little to serve taxpayers' interests but does offer them a tidy profit. We need to make sure that the voice of ordinary taxpayers who don't want to see wasteful spending driving up their taxes year after year is heard.
There are a number of sources of information from the TPA that can inform what you say to the consultation.
We have produced the book How to Cut Public Spending which has a huge amount of information about how politicians can get spending under control and deal with the fiscal crisis. For those who don't have the time to read the book, we have produced a new one-page guide to the proposals to save £50 billion that are a part of it, and build on our work with the Institute of Directors. That is now available here.
If you need more information, on a wide range of issues from local government to international aid, take a look in the TPA research
archive.