THE OUTPOURING OF MONEY. T HE demand of the Chancellor of
the Exchequer for another Vote on Account for £500,000,000 has given an opportunity to the daily Press and to the House of Com- mons to protest against the absolutely reckless way in which public money is still being spent. From the beginning of the war private individuals outside Parliament and a minority of Members of Parliament have exerted themselves to secure some economy in public expenditure. It must be sorrow- fully recorded that their efforts, with a few minor exceptions, have been in vain. So far from any economy being effected, the scale of extravagance has grown ever more lavish. At the present moment we ought to be spending relatively less than we were at a timo when Russia accounted for a large part of our financial burden. Russia has fallen out of the war, but instead of any reduction there is an increase of three-quarters of a million a day in this year's Estimates as compared with last year's expenditure. The only general explanation which can be found is the fact that publio expen- diture is being controlled to a very large extent by the people who are themselves paid out of that expenditure. We have left far behind us the salutary maxim that he who pays the piper shall call the tune ; at present the tune is being called by the pipers themselves in the Shape of a gigantic civilian army of officials of every grade, many of them inspired by the hope of making their offices, established for purely war purposes, permanent.
Several attempts have been made to deal with this notorious scandal by the Committee on Public Expenditure over which Mr. Herbert Samuel presides. Pri...,tically nothing has been done to give effect to the recommendations of that Committee. The Treasury did indeed, as a result of this Committee's last Report, proceed to appoint two new Committees, one, consisting of prominent business men, to deal with the question of Government contracts, the other, consisting mainly of officials, to deal with the question of overstaffing of Government offices. Some idea of this overstaffing can be gathered from particulars recently given by Mr. Stanley Baldwin in answer to a question from Mr. Herbert Samuel. These particulars relate to the conditions prevailing in certain Government offices in February last. Since that date most of the offices concerned have continued to expand their staffs. The Ministry of Munitions, as the public will expect, heads the list with a central staff at the headquarters offices in London of no less than 16,809 persons, exclusive of the staffs of the provincial offices, of arsenals and national factories. This London staff costs the gigantic sum of £2,775,000 a year. There can be not the slightest hesitation in saying that a staff of this magnitude is not only unnecessary, but is actually obstructive to national work. It is enormously in excess of the corresponding staff in Paris, which, as we are able to state authoritatively, consists of 2,600 persons. The evidence of private firms who have occasion to deal with the Ministry of Munitions is that hours of valuable time are wasted in hunting about from department to department to get an answer on a simple point. The numerous branches and sub-branches of the Ministry of Munitions, as has been pointed out by, the Select Committee on Public Expenditure, are engaged in blocking one another's way, and also blocking the .progress of private firms engaged in supplying munitions. Whether a staff of even a tenth of this size is needed for the central work in London is doubtful. The War Office comes next with a staff of 16,100 ; then the Ministry, of National Service with a headquarters staff of 994, and regional and local staffs " amounting to 13,516. 'What the Ministry of National Service does with its 14,000 officials nobody has ever in public ex- plained, but there is good reason to believe that a considerable portion of its activities is devoted to struggling with the Employment Exchange Department, which in turn has staffs amounting to 5,763. In addition to these two bodies, which largely overlap and confuse one another we have the Ministry of Pensions with a staff of 5,714, which is engaged to a considerable extent in similar work, for it quite properly attempts to find employment for dbcharged soldiers. It is useless to follow the portentous list of Departmental staffs any further in detail. The total number of persons employed in February last was 94,500, and the annual cost was £13,308,000. But these figures even then only covered a portion of our bureaucracy, and many of these offices have since been con- tinually expanding their staffs, and are expanding them still.
It was becalise of the indignation created throughout the country at the enormous expense incurred in paying this gigantic army of officials, which now, Mr. Herbert Samuel Us us, exceeds 100,000 men and women, that the Treasury, tardily taking action, appointed the Committee above referred to to inquire into the overstaffing of Government offices. Sir John Bradbury presided over the Committee, and it included other members of the bureaucracy—namely, Mr. Warren Fisher, of Somerset House, and Miss Durham, of the Employment Exchange Department. The Committee has now issued an interim Report, but that section of the public which has not grasped the true character of the official mind will be surprised to learn that this interim Report has no bearing upon the main subject entrusted to the Committee. Instead of suggesting means by which these overgrown staffs may be at once reduced, the Committee at great length considers on what principles further staffs should be recruited. The question it discusses through six folio pages of close print is whether these separate Departments should be allowed to recruit their staffs themselves, or whether they should be compelled to recruit through the Civil Service Commission, that body to be expanded accordingly in order to be able to deal with all the applications anticipated.
If the Departments are allowed to select their own staffs, then it is certain that officials of almost every grade will bring into Government employment their- own friends and relations regardless of the needs of the service or of the efficiency of the servant. This is being done to-day on a wholesale scale. In addition, as Sir John Bradbury 's Com- mittee reports, officials discharged by one Department for sheer incompetence are taken on by another Department, sometimes at higher salaries. In these respects control by the Civil Service Commissioners would effect improvement, but it must not be forgotten that the Commissioners, though occupying the position of Judges in the sense that they are irremovable except by a vote of -both Houses, have on occasion allowed themselves to be overruled by Ministers of the Crown, and given their sanction to questionable appoint- ments. The Civil Service Commission has now been to a large extent superseded by the Employment Exchange Department invented by Mr. Churchill when he was at the Board of Trade. This Department was started with the pretext of finding work for' the unemployed. It has effect- ively found work for thousands of clerks who wish to be employed in its own and some other Government Departments. Apart from this achievement, there is no evidence that this De- partment has done any work which could not have been better done by private agenoies. It has proceeded step by step to extend its operations, which mainly consist in card-indexing names of persons who are seeking now, or ever have sought, a change in their employment. The manipulators of this card- index occupy buildings covering several acres of land at Kew.
Not content with dealing with manual workers, the Employ- ment Exchange Department has latterly organized a special branch for dealing with professional workers, in spite of the fact that a number of highly efficient organizations have long been in existence for helping professional workers to find employment. No better illustration could be found of the relative impotence of a Minister in face of the permanent officials of his Department than the way in which the officials of this Department have compelled Mr. G. H. Roberts to give his implied sanction to their policy. Mr. Roberts is one of the ablest of the many able Labour Ministers who have come to the front in the past few years. All his instincts are opposed to the centralizmg tendencies of our ever-growing bureaucracy, yet behind his back the officials of his Depart- ment are building up an organization which will deprive labour of every kind of freedom of movement without official sanction. In the meantime most of these new Departments are engaged in warring against one another ; nearly all are engaged in Increasing the taxes of the public. This is not an exaggerated picture of what is going on to-day. Indeed, those behind the scenes would paint the realities in an even darker colour. Yet, so far as can be gathered, the country is powerless to prevent this waste of its money and this interference with its liberties.
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