Birmingham bin strikes could be tackled with DOGE-like approach, says Reform's Richard TiceTimes Radio
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00:00The first thing you've got to do is you've got to you've got to cut the huge amount of wasteful
00:05spending which we see everywhere. I mean I'm just hearing ludicrous examples at council level,
00:11regional level, national level. To be clear you wouldn't be you wouldn't sorry to interrupt you
00:16you wouldn't be cutting council budgets though would you surely? I mean many councils around
00:19the country are already bankrupt. There's a reason why so many of them are in real financial
00:25difficulty and that is because of the huge waste that is going on in councils. The procurement
00:31contract they've placed, grotesque in many examples. So you would be cutting council budgets?
00:38Let me finish. Where we hopefully will win some councils we will carry out a root and branch
00:44review of every line item of expenditure to find out what on earth is going on. So we think there's
00:49huge wasteful public sector spending across the board. Regulations there's far too much daft
00:55regulation holding business back. Energy costs. We can come back to energy costs because it is a
01:01hugely important question but I want to be very clear about what you're saying about councils. It
01:05seems to me you're saying you would cut council budgets. Is that accurate? No what we're saying
01:10is that there is huge wasteful spending within councils the degree of which we know is substantial.
01:16What we don't know is exactly what because we haven't got access to the books. Once we've got
01:20access to the books we can find out what's been well spent, what's being badly spent, what you can
01:25cut out and then we can say to constituents, to voters in that particular area right this is where
01:32we can save money. This is where we can provide the proper range of services because voters know
01:38they're paying ever more council tax and yet the services in terms of repairing potholes in terms of bin
01:44collections is becoming ever worth.