I agree with that, but what dealing with excessive spend on contractors, agencies etc requires is proper policing and regulation and that requires money to be invested in the staff to do it.
Sorry for butting in as they say but this is close to my heart politically speaking..
The problem with this, is that it cant be solved with a conservative government in power. Why? Because most conservatives are private is better than public no matter what.. to such a degree that it is irrational. On There are no checks and balances. Now I am Venstre man, but I am a traditionalist Venstre man... a pragmatist. Do I prefer private ownership and companies? Yes, but only up to a point... certain things need to be in the public sphere and you cant do it in the private sphere.
Of course the flip side with left wing governments (the bad kind) want everything in the public sphere which aint always the best either.
Increasing investment in monitoring would reap benefits, but the government prefers to see private companies profiting and blame the overspend on the local management of public services.
Problem is often that monitoring is given to private companies.. I have seen a case where the private monitoring company was set to monitor companies that were owned by the same holding company.... this was not found out for quite a while..
Another issue is that legislation often prevents government in getting the best price, but also normal contractual penalties for not meeting requirements and so on. Government in all countries are often hampered by legislation and incompetence in actually monitoring private contractors. The key is to set up a system that actually does that.. a review system. In Denmark we have such a system (in parts) and it has worked some what.
An example from Denmark that still pisses me off is ISS. It is the biggest service company in the world (and is Danish). Chances are that any private company in a hospital (cleaning, food making and so on) is ISS (hell I think they run the Westminster Catrina now days). Now in Denmark, ISS won a contract to take care of an old peoples home. It took complaints from family members and then the monitering group for ISS to get kicked out. But of course being the public sector, there was no real penalties (other than bad press) for failing to live up to the contract they had signed.
It's central government policies that have created the overspend, but it's all too easy for them to scapegoat the little people implementing their failed initiatives.
I agree. But lets also face it, governments of whatever colour have a hard time to actually do what is necessary. The UK has a deficit of 70 billion pounds. You cant cut that away.. you need income as well.
However on the cutting aspect, it is hard.
Take benefits. We both know that there are generations of families in the UK (and many countries) who live of the state. They cost society billions a year. Fix that! The left wont touch it, the right would love too but know that it would cost them votes.
Or taxes. Make sure people and companies actually pay the taxes they are suppose too! The left would love to do something about it, but also know that their corporate backers would not like it, and the right does not want to touch it.
Would a conservative government ever dump Trident? of course not.. it is their penis extender.. but that could save a ton of money. They would rather cut benefits, which the left would not do.. and so on and so on and so on.
There are more of course, but it all comes down to politics and not pragmatism and that will choke any country over and over again.