The next time roadworks leave you crawling through a queue of brake lights, spare a thought for Scotland’s so-called “traffic cone tsar”.
Kevin Hamilton receives total remuneration of up to £125,000 a year, although questions remain over what his role delivers in practical terms.
As Scottish Road Works Commissioner, he oversees a team of six. Yet the office says it is “not resourced to reactively investigate individual roadworks”, a caveat that will do little to reassure motorists stuck in disruption.
For critics, it is another example of the costly bureaucracy that has become familiar in the high-spending era of devolution, sitting alongside a sprawling public-sector network that includes around 130 quangos at the last count.
Then there is the wider bill for government giveaways — from “free” prescriptions and tuition to proposals for schoolbags for every new primary pupil, a scheme estimated to cost £6.5million a year.
The truth is Scotland has maxed out its credit card under the SNP, and now the bill is about to land on the doormat with an ominous thud.
John Swinney is talking vaguely about the need for sweeping reform, which could involve merging health boards and councils, and presumably tsars will be in the firing line, at least theoretically.
You might wonder whether Mr Swinney has the willpower to take on the unions and force through big changes – and why he, or the governments of which he has been part since 2007, didn’t get round to it sooner.
John Swinney has been unwilling to reckon with the rising public sector spending in Scotland
The SNP has added to endemic waste and now expects us to believe it’s ready to wield the axe, though presumably it will cave in to the next public sector pay demand when strike threats loom.
The party’s tenure has included the most generous pay settlements in the UK. The cost so far is around £27billion and accounts for more than half of the Scottish Government’s resource budget.
Settling the bill will be a painful reckoning but there’s no real indication that the Nationalists are up to the task, preferring to live in Cloud Cuckoo Land – despite the familiar rhetoric about the need to tighten belts and trim the fat.
The SNP’s draft Referendum Bill, setting out the terms of a vote that won’t take place, shows it is incapable of getting to grips with reality.
Published last week, it illustrates the true priorities of a party which is prepared to talk the talk when it comes to managing the economy – but comes nowhere close to taking the action needed to back up its vague promises.
The independence crusade is an excuse for continued inertia – while the SNP keeps splurging money it doesn’t have on policies it can’t afford.
State handouts are costing us nearly £10billion a year, stoking a toxic dependency culture which drains the nation of talent and prevents any prospect of growth.
Scotland’s welfare agency has ballooned to a record size – with more than 4,000 staff on the payroll.
Benefits are our only credible growth industry – and in June last year a senior SNP minister, Shirley-Anne Somerville, said she was ‘happy’ for the sum spent on handouts bill to skyrocket. The mere existence of that doomed Referendum Bill is further proof that the SNP exists in a fantasy realm.
It’s the equivalent of someone heavily in debt, with sheriff officers at the door, who ignores the banging and starts browsing online for Ferraris.
Or a party chief executive endlessly ordering goodies on Amazon using other people’s cash, heedless of the potential consequences.
The SNP have introduced a draft bill for a new independence referendum
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Public Finance Minister Hannah Mary Goodlad summed up the contradiction neatly on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions last week when she said nothing would be off the table when it came to shaking up the public sector to save money.
Yet she also said Scotland’s economy was the ‘envy of the world’, for which she was roundly (and justly) mocked by her fellow panellist, the journalist Magnus Linklater.
The second statement discredits the first – anyone who genuinely believes the latter claim needs to lie down in a darkened room with a cold flannel on their forehead.
They certainly can’t be trusted to redesign the bloated state (take a look at Police Scotland if you want to know how it’s likely to pan out, if it ever happens).
Ivan McKee, the Minister for Public Sector Reform, says the SNP is ‘rewiring the plane while it’s in flight’, and ‘we’re trying not to crash it and trying not to run out of fuel’ – not really words you want to hear from your pilot.
Taxpayers are funding a ‘bloated’ civil service that now employs a staggering 28,000 people – a record figure.
The vast majority of these employees work from home at least three days a week, leaving expensive government buildings like ghost offices.
The SNP spent years vilifying former chancellor George Osborne for ‘Tory austerity’ but now it needs to embark on a cost-cutting drive of its own.
It has to come up with savings of round £5billion by the end of the decade – and we may get a better idea of how Mr Swinney intends to go about doing so when he launches his Programme for Government.
MSPs will be back in parliament today to hear the grand plan – but there’s no suggestion that the proposals to rein in costs, which we’re told are being considered, amount to anything more than tinkering around the edges.
Perhaps the first act should be the launch of a Freebies Commission, looking at their value for money and sustainability – though you can bet the chairman’s salary on its own would be eye- watering, maybe even eclipsing the wage packet of the ‘traffic cone tsar’.
On day one, it should consider the recent joint review by the Scottish Government and higher education umbrella body Universities Scotland.
It found universities face a funding gap of around £200million, and that teaching Scottish students is under-funded by roughly £288million a year.
Universities are increasingly dependent on income from international students to stay solvent, while places for young Scots are strictly capped.
Scottish Universities face a funding gap of around £200million
Meanwhile, the bill for public inquiries has topped £250million and, as the Mail revealed recently, the former chairman of the ongoing Sheku Bayoh Inquiry, Lord Bracadale, raked in more than £711,000 before quitting his role amid a row over alleged bias.
The university funding gap could be reduced or wiped out if some of these inquiries were ditched, or brought to a swifter conclusion.
It’s time to cut up the credit card, balance the books and tell voters the truth – a novel concept for Mr Swinney and his deluded comrades.
To govern is to choose but like its former chief executive Peter Murrell, the SNP chose to spend, spend, spend with no thought for the future.
Murrell is now pondering his crime spree from inside a prison cell, but the party he once ran will also face a severe punishment if it can’t stop wasting our hard-earned cash on a monumental scale.
