TRANSPARENCY
And in an age when we’re asking people to put up with tax rises and spending cuts to pay for Labour’s Debt Crisis
we can use technology to give people even more power – through transparency.
If a company is failing and new management comes in, transparency is the first thing they demand - opening up the books and seeing how every penny is spent.
It’s going to be the same with us.
So today I can announce our ‘People’s Right to Know’ plan – a democratic check on wasteful spending.
Every item of government spending over £25,000, nationally and locally, will have to be published online.
If you want to see how it could work, look at the Missouri Accountability Portal.
http://mapyourtaxes.mo.gov/MAP/Employees/It will show you why transparency is such a powerful tool in controlling public spending.
And it can have an especially powerful effect when it comes to salaries.
Spending on public sector salaries has soared under Labour.
Where this has gone to nurses, doctors, teachers, police and other frontline stars, that is money well spent.
But it’s certainly not true of the wage bill for the swarm of unaccountable quangos that has infested our country under Labour.
[ unquote my words ]. How a small inefficient, inept Jersey quango wants to become an even bigger monster and at arms length from elected politicians.
They even paid £52,000 to outside consultants to get some leverage.
http://www.gov.je/Government/Pages/StatesReports.aspx?ReportID=399Quote continued.
In the age of austerity, where we’ll be asking frontline public sector workers to help us keep pay levels down we cannot leave the pay of public sector bureaucrats untouched.
People have a right to know exactly how much they’re getting.
So we’ll publish online all public sector salaries over £150,000.
Let’s see which officials have been getting rich at the taxpayer’s expense - and whether they’re worth the money.
Today we’re publishing a list of some we already know about.
Ed Richards at OfCom – he earns over £400,000 a year.
In fact, if you took the top thirty salaries at Ofcom, the communications watchdog, you could provide the whole of Cheltenham with free broadband access.
And then there’s the British Waterways Board.
The salaries of their top four employees – Robin Evans, Nigel Johnson, James Froomberg and Phillip Ridal – add up to £900,000.
That’s thirty nurses.
In the age of austerity we’ve got to ask ourselves what we really value in the public sector: and I know what the answer is.
It’s not the fat cats but the frontline workers.
http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2009/04/The_age_of_austerity_speech_to_the_2009_Spring_Forum.aspx.
