AS UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown gets himself in more of a tangle trying to pretend that a reelected Labour administration would next year spend more on public services, so more rational voices are advocating cuts.

Senior officials are looking at ways of slicing 20% off existing spending and, in reaction to weekend media coverage, the Chancellor has said there could be a public sector pay freeze.

At the same time, the chief executive of the UK Audit Commission was advising that the time had come for significant cuts because so much had earlier been lavished on the sector that it was time for a rebalancing.

He drew on his own experiences on Camden Council, cutting £65m. from a budget of £220m. and shrinking staff by nearly a third. ‘The result,’ he says, ‘was that staff morale and service quality improved.’

Sadly for islanders, the same message is not getting through here.

Departments are clamouring for more of the taxpayers’ hard-won earnings but there is no coordinated political initiative to turn off the spending tap and trim Guernsey’s bloated bureaucracy.

Which minister, which official can be identified as the taxpayers’ friend in all this? The Policy Council’s involvement has merely been to assist with proposals to spend even more, not take the lead in reacting to today’s new realities.

Nor is it too strong to describe the public sector as bloated. As Tribal Helm highlighted, a financially profligate culture has been allowed to flourish in government and the consequences are that services, jobs and salaries have been allowed to grow in the times of plenty.

Yet instead of seizing the opportunity of remodelling and modernising Guernsey’s public sector, ministers and their boards are busily trying to find ways of blunting Tribal Helm’s recommendations.

The other reality, of course, is that it is difficult for the States professional advisers to be really radical and ruthless in driving cuts because they are so intimately part of the civil service tribe.

This is one area where external help is needed – and a minister with the courage to champion a new era.