The easy way to save £50bn

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