Today the Treasury have launched a new online Spending Challenge. They are asking for your views on what can be cut. As we said before about a similar site asking for ideas on laws to scrap, it is easy to get cynical about this sort of thing but it is important that we do take the opportunity to have our say when politicians create a space to do so. We’re hoping as many of our supporters as possible will get involved even if it is just by voting for ideas the TPA and others people have submitted.
We’ve made a start by submitting four ideas based on our research - and proposals in the book How to Cut Public Spending:
-
- Increase employee contributions to all unfunded public sector pension schemes by a third
-
- End government funding for ‘green consultancy’ firms
-
- One-year freeze of the resource and capital budgets of the Department for International Development
-
- Reduce gross annual pay by 15 per cent for the richest 10 per cent in the public sector
There are two things you can do to promote important cuts in public spending and help our campaign for lower taxes:
-
- Suggest your own ideas. Once you have registered (and hopefully voted for some of our suggestions), you can “Submit an idea” and put forward other potential savings. If you suggest any ideas that we haven’t covered in our research then let us know in the comments on this post.
Here’s hoping that the politicians are really listening and we can get the spending cuts that are needed to put the economy back on track in the Spending Review later this year.