Views
Those in the know should be consulted - for the Inverness Courier
THE next 12 months or so are going to be crucial for the economy, locally and nationally.
While it has seemed over the past few months that economic decline has stopped - and some sectors are doing well - there is a widespread expectation that the economy will slow down again and so the recession will continue for some time yet.
Locally, it has been heartening to see construction starting to get going again as well as the good summer that our tourism industry has been having. But the tough times for business are still not over, and the tough times for public sector budgets are only just beginning.
We need to do all we can to maintain public investment until the recovery is clearly well underway. But once that is clear, there is a huge job to be done to bring the government's books back into balance and reduce the huge deficit that has been built up over the past year or so.
As Vince Cable nationally and David Alston locally have been saying, it is important to be honest about the scale of the challenge that this poses and the scale of the savings that will need to be made over the next few years. An unfair funding formula set in Edinburgh already puts Highland Council under pressure, and so there will be important decisions to be made.
At a national level, I would prefer to see savings made by finding things that government does not really need to do - or are wrong - and stopping them. If the government were to drop the replacement of Trident, completely end the ID card project, and stop many wasteful IT schemes then a good start could be made.
An initiative Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg launched last week could really help to find appropriate savings - by asking the people in the know, public sector workers themselves. The government should be listening to these professionals.
Every week at Prime Minister's Questions, David Cameron and Gordon Brown are having a sterile debate about the size of the total Whitehall budget. But they are asking the wrong question: we first need to find out if money is being spent on the right things. It cannot be right that billions of pounds are being spent on NHS computer systems which do not work, yet basic help for people with serious mental health conditions is still lacking because of a shortage of money.
The people who are best placed to tell us where money is not being well spent are the teachers, nurses, social workers and other public servants who work so hard day and night on our behalf.
We need to listen to the people in the know on how we can better run public services, making sure that every penny of taxpayers' money is well spent.
Anyone with ideas can contribute them - in complete confidence - at a special website www.nickclegg.com/intheknow. Comments about spending locally or nationally are welcome. We will use the ideas that come forward to try to inject some commonsense into this debate.
ASDA DECISION
The agreement between Asda and Highland Council that the supermarket will, after all, fund road improvements driven by their new store - once they are proved to be needed - is a step forward. It clears the way for Asda to build their store and bring some much-needed competition to Inverness.
The traffic impact will have to be monitored very closely, and the funding triggered the moment any problems arise.
Posted on: 08/09/2009
