The Government wants YOU to cut their spending
people of the country what it can do to cut it’s spending, but that’s what they’ve actually done, and to help people to tell them their ideas, they’ve created a website where people can post their ideas and others can vote on them.
Personally, my thought is that this is the first time in a long time that any British government has actually really given its people a chance to play a part in what they do and how they use our money, and I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all – in theory! In practice however, I wonder how it will really work, and whether what we say will actually make any difference.
The website is designed reasonably simply so that you can post your idea or search to see if someone else has already posted something similar, and then add your thoughts to that thread. So for example, if you wanted to suggest that prisoners should get less privileges like TV, sports facilities and so on to save money on the prison service so we could keep imposing long sentences then you could search for the term prison and see what you could find there.
Interestingly, although this site’s only been going for a matter of days, there are already a huge number of suggestions on there, and many comments to go with them, though in part this could be because before opening the site up to the general public, it was opened initially to public sector workers to see if it would work.
The website will be open until the end of August, and there will be a series of events and public meetings held around the UK during the summer as well to ask the same question. After that, the ‘champions’ team in the cabinet office and treasury will take forward the more promising ideas and work out what they’d save. They will then by reviewed by Ministers who’ll take the final decisions.
Will this work? I think that’s a question only time will be able to answer, but I do know that it IS radically different from anything any of our former governments have done, and perhaps it will help to show this government what the public actually want and how best to serve us. It’s a chance we’ve never really had before, to step in and directly tell the government what WE, the people that they are working for want, so I say, take the opportunity and make your voice heard. I know I will be!
