Bayly Andrew: Oral Questions — Questions to MinistersText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBayly Andrew: Oral Questions — Questions to Ministers[Sitting date: 07 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3303. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]2.ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua)to the Minister of Finance: What steps has the Government taken to get on top of its spending?Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance):It is a continuous job of the Government’s not just through Budgets but day to day across the Public Service to improve value for money. After all we have hundreds of millions of dollars only because people working in the rain today will next week hand over $200 or $300 of PAYE money that they could have used a lot better. So we take a very serious view of the stewardship. The total annual cost of new initiatives in this Government’s previous six Budgets is less than $2.9 billion. The last six Budgets of the previous Governments had $20 billion of new spending and the best measure of the problem with that was the Salvation Army in 2008 saying that it had not seen any measurable improvement in social outcomes for all the huge new spending.Andrew Bayly: Will the Government take further steps to cut spending in light of lower than expected revenue?Hon BILL ENGLISH: No we will not be pursuing cuts in services or income support in a knee-jerk response to lower tax revenue. It is not to say that there will not be some services that we stop paying for because they are ineffective and they are not making a difference to New Zealanders’ lives. Such measures if we were to cut services randomly to chase revenue targets would undermine the confidence of New Zealanders in the quality and effectiveness of public services at a time when public trust in public services is the highest it has been. So we do not want to upset that level of confidence.Andrew Bayly: What is the Government’s record in delivering better public services while staying on top of spending?Hon BILL ENGLISH: The Government’s record is good but of course we need to do a lot better. Three years ago the Prime Minister set 10 challenging targets for the Public Service that ranged over better health better educational achievement reducing crime and lowering welfare dependency. We are making improvements in pretty well all of these areas and we are not satisfied that continuing with all existing programmes just to keep people happy is good enough for New Zealanders. We have also been reprioritising. In fact over the last six Budgets there has been around $15 billion of reprioritisation to make sure we get better results.Andrew Bayly: What is the Government’s approach to delivering long-term cost savings in relation to the provision of public services?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Of course the Government is focused not just on savings this year we are focusing on intergenerational savings. If we resolve problems in complicated families and struggling communities then we will be spending less in the long run. For example 1 percent of the children born in 1990 had contact with Child Youth and Family before the age of 5. They had parents who were in contact with the corrections system and had been in households supported by benefits for most of their lives. Thirty-six percent of people with these three factors will be on a benefit at age 35. So you know that pretty much from when they are born compared with 9 percent of the general population. Almost 5 percent of this group will be in prison at the age of 35. Some of these individuals will cost around $1 million each just in corrections Child Youth and Family and income support costs and that represents significant misery in families and communities. We will continue to change things in order to change their lives.Grant Robertson: With reference to the first supplementary answer that the Minister gave which of the following items of spending from Labour Budgets that he likes to criticise has he got rid of: 20 hours of free early childhood education Working for Families interest-free student loans; or is it not just true that the Minister has failed to come up with new ideas and now has failed to get new ideas to grow the economy as well?Hon BILL ENGLISH: I can confirm that even by Labour’s measure of those programmes its best years are behind it.