HomeRead articles It's time to cut back on bureaucracies, says Fallon
It's time to cut back on bureaucracies, says Fallon
Jim Braithwaite, chairman of the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA), has been criticised for spending £53,308 on taxis and a driver last year. Now MPs are probably the wrong people to start criticising other people’s expenses. But £53,000 is a lot of money to spend on taxis and a driver (why both?). And it’s your money.
More interesting was Mr Braithwaite’s explanation. “I have to look after eight million people and 700,000 businesses”, he said. Really? Did you know that Mr Braithwaite was looking after you?
Let’s be clear what SEEDA does. It’s based in Guildford to promote the south-east region. You might think that the UK’s biggest and most dynamic region doesn’t need promoting. You’d be wrong.
For SEEDA doesn’t just have an office in Guildford. It has offices all round the world – two in Japan (Yokohama and Osaka), three in the United States (Boston, Chicago and California), another one in Sydney, as well as one in Brussels.
And SEEDA is expensive. It spent £195 million of our taxes last year. And its costs keep on going up.
Take staff: SEEDA employs 370 people. Staff costs topped £17 million in 2006-07, up 12 per cent on the previous year. Staff numbers only increased by 8 per cent, so some people are clearly getting nice bonuses or big salary increases or both.
SEEDA’s job is to promote the region. But we have lots of other bodies doing exactly the same. The county councils. The Government Office for the South-East (GOSE), also based in Guildford. Other bodies like Locate in Kent are there specifically to attract inward investment. There’s endless duplication.
Do our hard-pressed south-east taxpayers really need to fund offices in Osaka and California? The government already has a body called UK Trade and Investment with a specific remit to attract new foreign investment into the UK. Why do regions need their own international offices?
The real problem with monstrosities like SEEDA is that they are completely unaccountable. They have huge spending budgets; they exercise enormous power over towns like Sevenoaks or Swanley. None of these people are elected by anybody. Mr Braithwaite is a Labour-appointee – he doesn’t have to knock on doors like me to stay in office.
It’s actually worse than that. Quangos like SEEDA aren’t just undemocratic – they act to undermine the democratic bodies we do have. Elected councils like Sevenoaks are over-ruled by Guildford. Councillors are constrained in their own decision-making by agendas and initiatives set by bureaucrats.
So it’s high time that we cut back on these ever-inflating bureaucracies. And told Mr Braithwaite to start driving his own car.
