New TaxPayers' Alliance and Institute of Directors Joint Report: "How to save £50 billion"

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A groundbreaking new report jointly produced by the TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA) and the Institute of Directors (IoD) lays out detailed proposals to save £50 billion of annual public expenditure. Inspired by the dire state of the public finances, which both David Cameron and Chancellor Alistair Darling this week said requires action, the two organisations - the leading bodies representing taxpayers and company directors, respectively - have joined forces to produce a series of 32 practical steps which have the potential to save £42.5 billion a year from 2010-11 and a further 2 steps saving £7.5 billion that could be introduced from 2011-12.

Key Findings

The full programme of 34 proposed savings consists of:

Item	Item description	Annual saving, £m
	Tackling areas of spending that are not performing Reducing items of spending that don’t work		£5,477
1	Abolish the Bus Service Operators’ Grant	£451
2	Abolish Sure Start	£1,456
3	Abolish Building Schools for the Future	£2,300
4	Abolish the Education Maintenance Allowance	£530
5	Halt further orders and upgrades for the Eurofighter	£740
	Curbing over-extended government Stopping government doing things it shouldn’t be doing		£1,595
6	Halve the government advertising and publicity budget	£270
7	Abolish Contact Point, the children’s database	£44
8	Abolish the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT)	£1,181
9	Abolish identity cards	£55
10	Abandon plans to extend the compulsory school leaving age to 18	£45
	Cutting out the middle-man Reducing agencies and people that get in the way of the frontline		£6,928
11	Halve public sector spending on consultants	£1,100
12	Reduce non-frontline staff in health and schools by 10 per cent	£921
13	Reduce the size of the civil service by 10 per cent	£1,233
14	Scale down ‘Local Education Authorities’ (LEAs) in England	£599
15	Slim down the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG)	£1,317
16	Rationalise the framework of regional government and business support	£940
17	Begin a thorough rationalisation of taxpayer funded quangos and public bodies, including total abolitions, funding reallocations and budget cuts	£818
	Tackling specific budgets Taking a more blanket approach on specific budgets		£6,491
18	Cut 25 per cent from the budget of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)	£725
19	One year freeze of the resource and capital budgets of the Department for International Development	£862
20	One year freeze of the Home Office resource and capital budgets	£360
21	One year freeze of the grants from the Department for Communities and Local Government to local and regional governments	£687
22	Cut 10 per cent from the budgets of non-ministerial departments, except for UK Trade and Investment and the UK Statistics Authority	£1,700
23	One year freeze of the grants given to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales (current spending only)	£1,400
24	Simplify and rationalise the skills system and the plethora of skills programmes	£757
	Tackling above-inflation indexing Increasing payments in line with inflation, but no more		£1,441
25	One year freeze of the Basic State Pension and the Minimum Income Guarantee	£1,441
	Restraining public sector pay and perks Recognising that the public sector has had a good deal recently		£8,711
26	One year pay freeze across the public sector, excluding members of the armed forces serving in conflict zones	£6,203
27	Increase employee contributions to all unfunded public sector pension schemes by a third	£2,508
	Cutting middle-class welfare Stopping paying benefits to people who don’t need them		£11,999
28	Abolish Child Benefit and the Child Trust Fund, and increase the Child Element of the Child Tax Credit to address child poverty concerns	£8,447
29	Taper away the Family Element of the Child Tax Credit at 39 per cent immediately upon exhaustion of the Child Element of the Child Tax Credit	£1,350
30	Target spending on free bus passes for the elderly and disabled on those who genuinely need it	£438
31	Abolish free TV licences	£564
32	Abolish interest subsidy to student loans	£1,200
	Total annual saving from 2010-11 onwards		£42,642
	Further emergency possibilities after 2010 If fiscal conditions were so bad as to require emergency savings		£7,421
33	A further one year pay freeze across the public sector, excluding members of the armed forces serving in conflict zones	£6,203
34	Reduce gross annual pay by 5 per cent for the richest 10 per cent in the public sector	£1,218
	Total potential annual saving from 2011-12 onwards		£50,063

For full details of each proposal, please see the relevant section of the full report, which is available online here.