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Value for our taxes?

Original title: Waar voor ons belastinggeld? 

In this study we examine seven public services in the Netherlands: primary and secondary education, hospital care, community-based and institutional nursing and care, the police and the justice system. The costs of most of these services rose faster in the period 1995-2010 than the output, even allowing for inflation. The cost price per unit product – a treatment in hospital, educating a child at primary school, etc. – thus increased continuously. Can the higher cost price be explained by an improvement in quality and greater effectiveness of the services in question? This is generally found not to be the case. The rating of the services studied by users remained constant or even fell in some cases. Service-providers regularly complain that their service is under pressure due to lack of resources, while reports in the media sometimes have a distinctly negative tone. If all this is true, this inevitably begs the question: where has all the extra money that has been made available over the last 15 years gone?