Osborne: 'Treasury is broken'

The Treasury is "broken" and in need of repair after 10 years of Gordon Brown's stewardship, according to shadow chancellor George Osborne.

Mr Osborne will outline his recipe for reform in a speech to the think tank Reform in London on Wednesday.

He will call on Mr Brown's successor to give up many of the extra spending and policy-making powers the Chancellor has grabbed for the Treasury over the past decade.

And he will urge the next chancellor to abandon efforts to micro-manage Government activities through more than 1,000 targets and Public Service Agreements with other Whitehall departments.

Mr Osborne will accuse Mr Brown of forgetting how to control public expenditure and instead turning the Treasury into one of Whitehall's major spending departments.

"It is time to fix a broken Treasury - it should do less but do it better," he will say.

Mr Osborne will point to expenditure on items like child benefit and tax credits totalling more than £20 billion a year - even though it is "one of the worst at spending money".

And he wants an immediate review of all the major IT projects under way, particularly in the wake of the fiasco of the NHS computer system.

"The Treasury has become the principal source of Government policy rather than an evaluator of its effectiveness," Mr Osborne is due to say.

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