Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

Again, this will hit families who are vulnerable. I have carried out a simple calculation of how this budget affects families on €60,000 per annum. God knows, that is not a great deal of money and those families will be eligible for affordable housing if the Minister's plan goes ahead. These are very ordinary families struggling to get by, but today's budget amounts to €2,300 in extra taxes, charges and levies on those families. That is the reality the Minister is presenting. These families are trying to cope with child care and the difficulties of living in straitened times.

We were told the Minister would be prudent in how he would invest scarce moneys. Why did he remove €2.2 billion from the public capital programme? He knocked over €1 billion from the State's contribution and €1 billion from the PPPs, which is a total of €2 billion. That is inexplicable when one recalls the Minister saying, time and again, that the one thing the Government would protect was its investment in the capital programme. Why has the Minister sacrificed €2 billion of it? That appears totally perverse at this difficult time.

The problem in this country is that there is a collapse of confidence in these Ministers to deliver value for money in the public service. That is the legacy of this Government. The annual catalogue of waste in the reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General has produced no more than an indifferent shrug from the Government. There is no resolve to change. Deplorable decisions have got us into this hole. Whether it was benchmarking, the birth of the HSE and how it was handled or the crass political handling of decentralisation, Ministers have failed time and again. They failed to lead change in the public service because they do not work to professional standards themselves. They are the first to break the rules when they wish to push through a pet project and they are the last to accept responsibility when something goes wrong.

How can these Ministers be taken seriously? Not one of them produced their statement of strategy on time, even though it is their legal obligation. They do not bother to measure three quarters of the tasks they regard as priorities when producing the annual output statements. Even last year, they only delivered a fraction of the commitments they undertook to deliver with the money we gave them. These are not Ministers one can take seriously. One will search in vain for radical reform in public service delivery in this budget. We were told by Deputy Cowen when he assumed the position of Taoiseach that public service reform would be the hallmark of his regime. It did not happen in the four years when he was in charge of the public service but that was to change. However, there is no change today.

There has been no change in the way budgets are put together. Budgets are still dished out without Ministers being tied to any hard and fast performance targets. Evaluations of major projects are still not published, even though taxpayers are expected to stump up the money for them. We still have agencies that are not paid on a performance basis. What is the result? We see it daily. It means that when the HSE runs out of money it closes down beds, instead of looking for more patients to come through so that money would be attached to those patients. It simply closes down the beds and tells patients it has nothing for them.

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