Prose will just not work

Recent sets of monthly data on government finance confirm that, while revenue is stagnating, expenditures have spiralled. So much for the repeated assurances we were given that, financially, everything has kept on track. While overall economic growth remains dicey, it is less than realistic to expect revenue growth to recover, despite the high taxation rates introduced by the Nationalist administration. If anything, pre-election concessions made by the government are likely to serve as an additional drag on its short-term cash position.

Worse, there is increasing cause for worry in the upward trend maintained by expenditures. Published figures understate the problem, probably by a significant margin. There was camouflaged overspending by government ministries and departments last year. What's more, the spending momentum was maintained during the first half of this year, not least because of the referendum and election flashpoints.

News that, early in January, departments had been given instructions to revise their plans, as if budgetary allocations were cut by 10 per cent for this year, made curious reading. As did the other news of this month, that the finance ministry would be directly enforcing the cut, since most ministers had ignored the original directive. One remembers with what gusto the finance minister used to argue against such measures.

He used to claim that it made no sense to introduce across the board cuts, and this with reference to the strategy followed by Labour between 1996 and 1998, when presenting its financial estimates, to introduce a five per cent reduction across the board on recurrent expenditures. Expenditures should not, could not, be controlled like that, we were earnestly told.

At least, the magnitude of the cuts targeted by Labour was realistic. It was injected into the budget when this was still being prepared, not after it had been presented to parliament and approved.

However, beyond which measures should be used to contain the onward spread of recurrent spending across budgetary items, it has become urgent to review the structural reasons for spending growth. The fashionable argument is that, as the welfare bill is the biggest expense item, radical pruning should first be attempted on it.

Clearly, abusive spending on social welfare entitlements should be curbed. But here too, the administration's commitment to financial rectitude is suspect. Ask about how certain sickness and retirement benefits are routinely used as partisan bait and you will understand what I mean.

Still, putting curtailment of welfare costs before other measures is not only counter-productive, but wrong. First, we need to see whether recurrent expenditure has not been growing too fast basically because current government structures and practices create waste. This might apply even for so-called innovations that were launched with much fanfare as administrative breakthroughs, but which have turned out to be vehicles for doing less with more.

We are now experiencing one such "experiment" come to live, as the government winds down the Malta Development Corporation, Metco and Ipse, merging them into a new white elephant, dubbed Malta Enterprise, that will cost the exchequer some three quarters of a million liri a year extra... for starters.

Nobody questions the fact that the MDC has been a managerial mess these last years. The priority should have been to sort that mess out, instead of wading towards a "solution" that is bound to make things messier.

Quangos have become the name of the game, all with their well-paid chairmen and executive staff who, in the eyes of many, have hardly brought about any improvement to what the "old-fashioned" civil service used to do. For instance -just by picking on one sector - it is not clear that structures like the "heritage" quango, the national council for sports, the body managing St James Cavalier and the arts council are delivering better value for money or containing costs. The opposite seems to be happening.

Again, for instance, it still is not evident what the rehabilitation committees for Valletta, the Cottonera district and Mdina should be there for. Do they not amount to a useless replication of resources, sandwiched as they are between departments, ministries and local councils? Are they cost effective or do they generate needless overheads?

Closer to the bone, consider the public-private partnership programme launched by the government for the embellishment of public places, using agricultural department personnel. Yes, embellishment there has been. But it has come at an extra expense of close to three quarters of a million liri, on top of what agricultural personnel and maintenance used to cost. Can we go on doing the same - or less - with more? Should not the government aim to achieve more, with less?

Unless these questions are faced and tackled, it would be socially unfair to target welfare payments, in order to check government expenditures. There has to be a coordinated all-out effort to come to grips with the administrative reasons that are jacking up public outlays. Such an effort should be seen as even more urgent, given that inevitably, as Malta joins the EU, new cost commitments will ensue.

Getting value for money, doing more with less, needs real political determination, not sham statements of intent. Nor can targets be achieved by top civil servants indulging in the well-known trick of issuing OPM circulars, telling others to do this or that. Unfortunately, in this kind of game, it is no solution to indulge in further displays of bureaucratic prose: this will just not work, if it ever did.