The government review of public spending has been a "partial failure", State Audit Court President Raffaele Squitieri said at the inauguration of the court's judicial year on Thursday.
The spending review has given "the essential issue of the interrelationship with the quality of services" a back seat, Squitieri said.
Consequently it has given rise not only to actions geared at improving efficiency and rationalising resources, but also to "less targeted operations to reduce, if not suppress, services to the collectivity", he added.
Squitieri also said that the margin of saving on public spending could be "limited" over the coming years.
"In an outlook for public finance that still requires non-marginal spending adjustments to be made, including in order to tackle the complex issue of the fiscal burden, the margin of saving on the expenditure front could turn out to be limited," the audit court president said. Spending cuts have given "important results on the level of aggregate data" since the start of the economic crisis, he added.
Squitieri also pointed out how the flexibility obtained from Europe has been "entirely used up" in the 2016 budget. "In this way, the drop in the public deficit has been maintained, but at a slower pace," he said. The court president added that the proliferation of complicated laws in Italy favours illegality.
"The complexity and multiplication of laws give illegality more fertile ground for taking hold, rather than defences against or obstacles to its spread," Squitieri said. "The efficient working of the judicial system as the main instrument for countering illegality represents a decisive element in the development and growth of the country," he added.
Squitieri also said renewed public investment is essential for growth.
"Recovering adequate levels of public intervention in major works is not only a key condition for meeting the European clause on investments required of the government, but also, and especially, for achieving adequate levels of growth, reabsorbing a delay in infrastructure provision that risks impacting on the country's competitive potential," he said. Squitieri's remarks were saluted by unions, consumer groups and voluntary sector representatives who have long criticised the spending review's impact on essential services. Nine million Italians no longer use the national health service, Susanna Camusso, leader of Italy's biggest trades union confederation CGIL, claimed Thursday. "They can't reach it anymore because of budget cuts and reduced services," she said.
"The failure of the spending review has produced a double loss for Italians," consumer association Codacons President Carlo Rienzi said. "On the one hand, it has not eliminated the waste and improper use of public resources that weights on the pockets of the collectivity; on the other, it has led to an increase in fiscal pressure, particularly with regards to local taxes," he continued.
The upshot is that residents "pay more to receive ever fewer services", Rienzi concluded.
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