by David Craig

The Tories have come up with a new slogan ‘Good Housekeeping’, with David Cameron declaring: “We have reached the limits of acceptable taxation and borrowing”. However, when questioned about where they can save money, members of the Opposition go curiously quiet.

Given Gordon Brown is now wasting £200bn a year, cutting expenditure without harming public services should be reasonably straightforward. Here are a few places the Tories might start.

Cut spending on management and IT systems consultants by half - saving over £3bn a year. Reduce the number of non-medical managers in the NHS by 30 per cent - another £3bn a year. Cut the budgets of all administrative and regulatory quangos by 10 per cent - £2bn more saved.

Impose a three-year pay freeze on all public-sector employees earning more than £50,000 a year, tax their retirement lump sums and introduce a special pensions savings tax to make their generous pensions self-financing rather than paid for out of our taxes - about £2.5bn.

Reduce benefits fraud, halve the number receiving invalidity benefits and make housing benefits only payable after the age of 21 - probably another £10bn.

Refuse to pay any more contributions to the EU until waste and fraud have been halved and UK auditors have given the EU accounts a clean bill of health - annual savings over £2bn. Cut the number of non-teaching education staff by 30 per cent - at least another billion.

Rebuild the discredited National Audit Office (NAO) under competent, independent management to do the job that it is paid to do. Then introduce a Whistleblowers’ Act which guarantees to pay frontline public-sector workers a percentage (say five per cent) of any savings achieved if they report examples of waste to a reorganised, effective NAO, saving at least £10bn.

That gives us around £33bn a year. Then there are a couple of easy one-off quick hits available by scrapping a few white elephants.

The £5bn+ ID Cards programme should be abandoned. If in a few years, another country successfully develops an effective system, the UK could adopt that system at a much lower cost than trying to develop its own.

The NHS computer system project should be stopped immediately, its proposed database of our records should be dropped, the project's management replaced and the NHS’s IT systems budget reduced by £5bn. The new management should then come up with proposals as to how the remaining money can best be used for the benefit of patients.

We should hand the 2012 Olympics back because it is now clear a mixture of incompetence, arrogance and greed from those bringing us the Games mean the UK cannot stage the Games at a justifiable cost.

Hopefully the Games can then be held in Athens both in 2012 and in the future. We may have to pay a few billion in compensation, but this will save UK taxpayers more than £10bn.

So far we're over £50bn. But there's much more that can be done to save taxpayers' money without having any negative effect on public services - in fact they would probably improve. If David Cameron wishes to find out more, he is welcome to get in touch.