EU Referendum


UK politics: financial infidelity


18/09/2013



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A constant theme of this blog is the inequity of the Council Tax system, where we are required, on pain of immediate committal to prison, to pay for what amounts to our "freedom license" to our masters, only to see them waste and misspend our money.

Now, in the loss-making Guardian and elsewhere we see that other side of the coin. Statutory authorities funded by Council Tax – in this case the police – are once again throwing away our money away, this time through poor procurement practices. But, while the examples given by the Public Accounts Committee in their report on Police Procurement are bad enough, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Right across the public sector, from the NHS, through defence to public service generally, and even the courts, we see hundreds of millions, running into tens of billions of pounds wasted each year. This is not just a problem with the police. It is endemic to government.

The trouble is that PAC head Margaret Hodge does not join the dots. She and her committee treats this as a separate problem, coming up with weak-as-dishwater recommendations that are specific to the service. This, in the Mail,is matched by the usual "comfort quote" from Matthew Sinclair, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA).

"Greater co-operation is urgently needed between forces in order to secure best value for money because it would be inexcusable to allow the vast differences in procurement costs to continue any longer", says Sinclair, an observation which will, no doubt, strike terror (not) in the heart of chief constables and their purchasing departments.

The heart of the problem, of course, is the lack of accountability. These people are not spending their own money and when they waste it or misuse it, there is no personal comeback. As a result, year, after year after year, we get the same problems, the same waste, the same weak recommendations, and the same lacklustre media coverage, bolstered by anodyne comments for the TPA.

We met this same issue back in June, with the wimps in the Taxpayers' Alliance missing the point while the German Taxpayers' Association was coming up with some really interesting ideas.

It noted that while public failure is as common as it is costly, this is not so much an immutable law of nature as a "system of collective irresponsibility". Just complaining about waste, it said, was simply not good enough. It wanted to make waste of public money a criminal offence.

Launching a new campaign, it argued for personal criminal liability being used to counter the "It's not my money!" mentality of decision-makers. The Association drew a parallel between tax evasion, for which the citizen can be punished, and government waste, for which there is no penalty.

Unlike our own patsy organisation, it has joined the dots and sees the two issues as different sides of the same coin, calling for full civil, criminal and legal responsibility to be applied to public servants for their actions. The mismatch between the prosecution of tax evasion and the lack of action against tax waste, it says, "is now striking".

The German Association wants to see a new offence of "Financial Infidelity" in the criminal code, to facilitate the prosecution of civil servants and public officials when tax money is wasted.

In addition, a special duty is imposed on those responsible for granting or spending public funds, which permits penalising poor performance. This, it argues, should apply through all levels of government, including municipalities and corporations or institutions where public law is applicable.

As someone who was jailed for refusing to pay the police precept after our property had yet again suffered the attention of local thieves, I have a special interest here. This really is a case of "what's good for the goose is good for the gander". If citizens are to be jailed for not paying their taxes, then officials should be jailed for wasting them.

Making "financial infidelity" a crime is, therefore, a highly attractive proposition – but not one you will hear from Margaret Hodge or Matthew Sinclair. And that is also part of the problem.

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