Kerb your enthusiasm (From Bournemouth Echo)

Kerb your enthusiasm

7:00pm Sunday 7th October 2007 in

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WHAT would you do with a £4,000 tax rebate? Holiday in Barbados? Pay off the old credit card? Re-do the bathroom?

Well, if the government and councils and other bodies spending public cash didn't waste so much of it, that's exactly what every one of us could look forward to - £4,000 off our tax bill, every single year.

According to the Taxpayers' Alliance - which has just published the 2008 edition of The Bumper Book of Government Waste - our government has squandered an eye-watering £101 billion of public money. Your money.

If you can't contemplate what that amount might look like, co-author Matthew Elliott is delighted to help. "You could, for example, paper the entire East Midlands and London with £5 notes, and still have a few billion left over to build one hell of a crane from which to admire your handiwork," he says. "Or you could convert the £101 billion into one penny coins, pile them on top of each other, and reach the moon and back five times."

How does he know all this? "The book is based on several different sources, reports from things like the public accounts committee in the House of Commons and the National Audit Office reports. A key source is Freedom of Information requests; we're one of the pioneers in this area and then of course there's our members. There are 15,000 of them and we ask them to send in examples too."

And they do. From the £280,000 spent by Messrs Blair and Brown on a conference on value for money in the public services, to the £2.1 million paid out to fly HM Customs and Revenue workers to Scotland, to the £100,000 on assessing whether an alleged £400,000 spent on modern art for seven hospitals was value for public money.

Elliott believes taxpayers have become increasingly interested in where their money is going because they have been taxed so heavily in the past few years. "They want to know where the money's being spent," he says.

The NHS is a key area. "The government says it has roughly doubled spending on the NHS and you'd think that standards would have massively improved, doubled even. But they haven't and people are now wondering where's the money gone." (Possibly on the much-derided new computer system: projected cost £31 billion.) And it's not just the NHS. Or the Private Finance Initiative Scheme which puts public bodies in hock to private lenders for decades to come. Or the Millennium Dome, or, even the 2012 Olympics, another financial bone of contention which has an entire squad of Taxpayers Alliance people looking into it. Who have already discovered that a majority of British people, even those in London, now believe the games will be too expensive and won't bring the promised benefits. (Cost: £9.3 billion and rising.) "People are worried about pensions because of the promises to fund those in the public sector and after Northern Rock, people are wondering where our money actually is and if it's safe," says Elliott.

The Bumper Book of Government Waste has been advertised in the past with the tagline "Read it and weep" and it isn't difficult to see why.

Vitriol is heaped on everything from the Privy Council Office, the Cost of Ken (Livingstone) and Public Arts Grants (a perennially rich and fruitful seam.) Then there's Non-Jobs, Ministerial Gifts and, of course, Europe.

But, says Elliott, it's often the smaller wasted sums that leave him feeling ill. "There was a council in Hampshire which realised that all its kerbstones were 2mm too high so they just ripped them up and put them back again, all just to meet some petty regulation. It's not their fault that there was this regulation but it's just that lack of common sense: surely we can live with a kerb being 2mm higher?"

And don't think that living in the relatively un-loony south west means we can avoid a whole list of accusations of chucking public money down the drain.

On page 65 Bournemouth Borough Council comes in for a kicking, over its decision to spend; "£6 million on a coastal erosion prevention scheme, which involved the placement of stones onto the beach. They have since removed them at the cost of £165,000 in order to gain back the lost tourism."

Page 64 criticises Regional Agencies like the South West Regional Agency, who have a staff of 280 and, claims the book: "A fair amount of its effort if not its purpose seems to be spent on managing EU grants, themselves not always of crystal clear benefit. At the very least, central government should commit itself to an honest cost-benefit audit of these institutions, and assess how many lasting private sector jobs they have created."

And these are just the ones that made it into the book. In the Daily Echo archives we dug up a plethora of horror stories l During spring 2007 Dorset County Council insisted on ploughing ahead with a cycle scheme on the Dorchester Road in Weymouth, despite residents, local cycling groups and 58 per cent of people in a survey saying they didn't want it.

l In May 2006 it emerged that the money lavished by Dorset County Council on developing software for libraries that was later abandoned equated to the running costs of 13 libraries threatened with closure.

l In August 2005, 25 officers and councillors from East Dorset District Council spent £7,000 on an away day' at the St Leonard's Hotel. Cllr Don Wallace said the issues "could have been discussed in the council chamber".

• The Bumper Book of Government Waste 2008 is published by Harriman House at £9.99