Get value for money from government

is an issue across the Atlantic Ocean, not just in the U.S. In the column "Get value for money from government" in the Independent, Steve Richards writes:

Convinced that the increases over the last decade have been a total waste, some on the right can hardly wait for the spending axe to fall. I have never understood the perverse argument that public investment is a waste. The appeal of the argument exposes a failure on the Government's part to link higher spending with a populist language. Mrs Thatcher's genius was to make her fleeting monetarist crusade seem necessary and sensible: "In our home in Grantham we did not spend more than we earned. The country should do the same".

No minister in recent years has offered an alternative version: "When we want to improve our homes we spend money and get the benefits. If we want to improve the country's schools, hospitals and transport we need to invest." Virtually alone in the western world there seems to be a powerful consensus in Britain that public services can magically improve without spending money.

Still, as the debate about public services moves into a new more stringent era, there is an urgent need for a new focus on efficiency. Those of us who have argued for European levels of investment must accept that some of the cash in recent years has been wasted. That does not mean the principle of higher investment was wrong, but the way the money was spent needed much more scrutiny. Not even members of the Cabinet knew, for example, about how much more GPs were going to earn under their new contracts.

More widely there are parts of the public sector that are over-staffed, complacent and reluctant to change. There are too many people in non-jobs that have no direct link with the provision of the services.

Proving value and focusing on transformational delivery of services rather than (stultified) business as usual is the direction that we need to move toward. Dysfunctional models can't continue to be supported when there is no longer the budgetary "flex" or capacity to continue to pay for mediocrity.

One of the "solutions" to poor government performance is more democracy, not less.