Labour should go into the next election promising to reassess every single item of departmental public spending in response to mounting government debt and the pressure on public resources caused by an ageing population, Stella Creasy, a Labour frontbencher has told the Guardian.
Creasy, one of the 2010 intake of MPs increasingly making their mark on parliament and best known for her campaigns against legal loan sharks, says Labour should propose a "zero-budget" spending review after the election in which every public service is re-examined. She argues that value for money in public spending is a "progressive agenda" because the poorest pay most tax.
"The whole idea that we can somehow manage this through salami-slicing does not match either the challenges we face due to demography or the financial mess the country will be left in. What does my generation of politicians do? Do we say, well, we will try our best to limit the damage, or do we say there is a new world out there, and it requires radicalism," she said.
"In the next spending review absolutely everything should be on the table and the onus should be not just in the government, but the public, the private sector and the third sector to say where could we work together. We don't need just to switch spending, we need to pool spending.
"Wasting money is not progressive. When the poorest people in our country pay the most tax, the value for money agenda is a progressive agenda."
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