Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

The Minister said an extra €6,700 was being spent for every man, woman and child in the country. That is true. The Government has spent an extraordinary amount of money in the last few years. In the seven years 2000 to 2007, current spending by the Government has increased by an astonishing 120%. That is €19,000 more in that period for every family in the country. Consumer prices in that period have increased by 28% so the Government has been commanding a significant extra dollop of resources.

The Government will say GNP has been growing but Government spending has been growing 50% faster than GNP. The Government is hugely expanding its tax take and spending. Indeed, current spending as a proportion of GNP has increased from 24% in 2000 to over 30% this year. The Government has been dramatically expanding its take.

With this money at its disposal, have we seen a transformation in the quality of public services? I believe the Government spends casually and leaves the taxpayer to pick up the tab. That is the reason we have not seen commensurate change. The Minister cited the extra manpower, buildings and so forth that have been generated by the €320,000 million in current spending and the €60,000 million in capital spending. We would want to see some extra buildings and manpower for that amount. However, that is not the test of value for money.

The real test of value for money is the experience of people who are dependent on and using public services. How are weak pupils doing in our schools? How are people who present with a medical emergency being treated in our hospitals? How are people who are prey to drug dealers and gangsters experiencing protection from the State? On those measures, we do not see an impact. The Comptroller and Auditor General showed that the relative position of weak pupils has not improved over a period of so-called priority for disadvantage.

In accident and emergency departments the same problems are still apparent. Even though there are no more people attending these departments than attended them ten years ago, there are still the same problems and in many cases they are more acute than they were previously. However, I take my hat off to the Minister, Deputy Harney, given that she has admitted that this is a national emergency. I hope the signs of improvement now visible will be sustained. The accident and emergency departments are still in a worse situation than they were two years ago, when she made that announcement. It was only when it became a national emergency and there was an effort to kick ass that anything changed. Similarly, the position of people who are prey to drug dealers and gangsters is continuing to worsen.

These are the tests that must be addressed. Targets must be set and Ministers must be judged against them. The real tragedy is that, once again this year, the Minister has compiled the Estimates with no programme evaluation and no targets set by Ministers by which the success of their spend will be judged. It is a spend of €60,000 million this year. No corner shop in the country would draw up its budget in that way. Anybody who tried to set a budget for the year ahead would be expected to set targets or benchmarks which would indicate success. That is not asked of Ministers and it is not good enough. It is not good enough to ask the taxpayer to stump up that type of money and not apply the rigours one would expect any minor business to apply.

There will be no meaningful debate in the House on the Estimates. Once again there will be no opportunity to evaluate the choices being made, what the targets should be for these choices or whether better choices could have been made. There will be no such debate. It is a meaningless debate occurring within two weeks of the Budget Statement, when the entire process will be wrapped up. So much for scrutiny and evaluation.

The truth is there is a tendency in the Government to seek to operate in the comfort zone of secrecy. That is the hard reality. Ministers do not wish to undergo serious evaluation but prefer to have their hour in the sun when they issue their press release and tell the world how much better it will be as a result of the 2007 Estimates. However, they do not have any suggestions to make regarding scrutiny of what happened to last year's promises. The taxpayer is expected to believe that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds and to make an act of faith in the instinct of these Ministers. Unfortunately, their past judgments do nothing to justify such beliefs.

It is intolerable that the Estimates have been presented in the same manner for an eternity and that the same procedure will be inflicted on us next year. One only needs to conduct a casual review of the promises made by Ministers to see why. Eight new units in acute hospitals were promised, yet the acute units announced two years ago for Beaumont Hospital have not yet been delivered. Last year we were told 75 primary health centres would be built but they have not materialised. The promised additional 230,000 medical and general practice cards have not been provided. Fewer than 40% of the target number of affordable houses have been built. Six of the transport projects which were announced last year have not yet commenced, so they are being announced again this year as if the bright eyed and bushy tailed Minister for Transport suddenly thought of a great new programme. The Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform claims to have already reached his target for the Garda, although the Minister for Finance at least has the honesty to admit we will not have reached it by the end of 2007. Spin is not enough when such vast sums of money are being spent.

Ministers seem to make their promises without so much as a blush of shame. How gullible does the Government think taxpayers are? We must insist that Ministers publish key performance indicators when they seek approval for their Estimates. They should not be awarded budget increases, whether of 10% or 2%, unless they commit to setting out what they plan to deliver. Such indicators have to become part of the Estimates procedures in order that they can inform a serious debate in this House on the options. We were promised in a document, which contained some interesting recommendations despite having room for improvement, that key performance indicators would be published by 2005. The Secretaries General of the Departments came together and decided to take this approach. However, the fact that the benchmarks for performance are to be delayed until after the next general election indicates the seriousness with which value for money is regarded by the Government.

The announcement in June by the Minister for Finance on the value for money initiative does not meet any acceptable standard. When the programme of expenditure review was introduced, it was intended to be a three year rolling programme within which the entirety of the Government's programmes would be subjected to critical evaluation, so that Ministers would act on the review's recommendations. The programme of review has since been ground into the dirt and, as the Secretaries General have admitted, there is no indication that the tiny number of reviews which were conducted have had any impact on programmes. That does not represent value for money but what the Minister announced in June is just more of the same. Of the promised 92 reviews, 31 are inheritances from schemes which were supposed to have been completed three or more years ago. The total value of the reviews to be undertaken in 2006 will represent less than 3% of total expenditure. At that rate, it will take 35 years to complete the programme. The extraordinary exemption given to the Department of Health and Children from any programme review means that we will not see a review from that Department until 2008, even though we have not seen one since 2001. During that period, it will have spent half of GNP, or €84 billion. Therefore, it is not surprising that people continue to sit in accident and emergency departments and wonder why, with spending trebled, the care they are receiving is no better than a decade ago. The Minister must reform this system if we are not to be continually disappointed with the progress we make. He has been citing lists of inputs without mentioning the critical test of success, outcomes.

Hidden within these estimates is a plan to substantially increase taxation. An additional €1,000 million in motor tax, social insurance and health and training levies will be raised from families and businesses in 2007. Families will struggle to find this extra money at a time when they are already tightly strapped from meeting the costs of rising interest rates, mortgage payments and energy bills. There is no evidence of sensitivity in this Government to the fact that it should cut its cloth, in terms of raising tax, to the measure of what people can afford. The Estimates also conceal increases in local authority commercial rates and planning development charges because the Minister is only making provision for a 2% increase in local government spending. I do not know how he will square that with the extra 7.4% he has allotted for the Government's general services.

The Government tries to run under the flag of a low tax administration but the massive pre-election spending spree in 2001 and 2002 entirely demolished that reputation. Of course, taxes did not start to bite until after the 2002 election. Since then the tax take, as a proportion of GNP, has increased by 4% and, for ordinary families, the tax take, as a proportion of personal income, has increased by 7% to 38.5%. Overall, the average household has had to come up with an additional €7,500 since 2002, as well as a further €3,000 in stealth taxes.

We have to move on from a sterile presentation of the Estimates which focuses solely on inputs to a serious debate about outcomes. Unfortunately, yet another year has been lost in making that change. Fine Gael and the Labour Party have published a joint programme, The Buck Stops Here, because we are determined to make the shift in the discussion from what we expect to gain from taxpayer's money in terms of spending programmes and projects to the question of outcomes. That will require tough discipline for Ministers and other officials with responsibility for programmes, as well as demanding standards in every area of expenditure.

In the area of crime we have to seriously consider the manner by which we deploy the resources of the justice system to deliver results. As Deputy Kenny noted earlier today, the budget of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, across the courts, the prisons and the Garda, has been more than doubled, yet crime levels have surged since 2000. All the gains made after the killing of Veronica Guerin have been lost in the intervening years. At the same time, detection rates for serious crime have decreased dramatically, from 44% ten years ago to 34% now. That means two out of every three people are getting away with serious crimes. The only measure guaranteed to predict whether crime is expanding is the chance of getting away with an offence. If we are presiding over a justice system in which the odds of criminals being able to get away with their crimes are increasing at an alarming rate, we are failing to deploy resources properly. If rigorous targeting and performance indications were being applied, there would be red faces in the justice system. We would be asking, for example, why the Prison Service does not measure the percentage of people who reoffend. It seems that the most obvious test of the success of a prison is whether those who leave it are more or less likely to reoffend. The percentage is not even measured, never mind a target for improvements.

The Minister ought to take this issue much more seriously. He should warn Departments that they will not receive budget increases if they do not implement evaluation programmes that are more serious and deep-rooted than the ones he announced in June. We will return here year after year, disappointed that the Government has not made sufficient progress in the past seven years on foot of the enormous opportunity afforded to it by its having 120% more funding available for public spending. We are not squeezing the maximum value from it by any means.

The Minister, or whoever has put together the data, has listed many inputs and outputs but one can ascertain what is missing by reading between the lines. Why do so few have free access to primary health care and why are there fewer preventive programmes? Why is it only the day care figures for hospitals, rather than the inpatient care figures, that have been subject to an increase? Why are there not better conditions for accident and emergency patients? The real tests of performance are being cutely ignored and facts that sound good are being used to fill up the Minister's speech. This is not good enough and the selective accounting in the Estimates is not doing justice to the taxpayer, who must ultimately come up with the money to fund the €6 billion in resources. We need a new Government that will take this challenge much more seriously than it has been taken by the current Administration in the past decade.

See this speech in context