Gordon Brown has promised to make drastic cutbacks in senior public sector pay and bonuses as he laid out plans to cut £3 billion from the cost of running Government.

Top earners would also be publicly identified and bodies that wasted public cash “named and shamed”, he said, warning that some had “lost touch” with reality.

Mr Brown said he hoped to shave 20% from the senior civil service pay bill over the next three years as the Government bids to cut the spiralling deficit.

Wednesday’s Pre-Budget Report is expected to confirm it will top £175 billion this year, the combined effect of a costly fiscal stimulus and plummeting tax receipts.

Other savings planned include getting more services online, which could cut £600 million from telephone and paperwork costs, and a 50% reduction in consultancy fees and 25% in marketing.

The PM said: “Of course public service is admirable and important and it deserves fair reward and we must never forget that our priority is excellence at the front line.

“In the wider public sector, some senior pay and perks packages have lost sight of this goal and lost touch with the reality of people’s lives.

“Money which should be spent on health, on schools, on policing and on social services is, in some cases, going on excessive salaries and unjustified bonuses, far beyond the expectation of the majority of workers. This culture of excess must change and will change.”

It was unacceptable that 300 local council officials were paid more than £150,000 and more than 300 across the public sector got £200,000 or more, he said.

“For £100 million you could have four new secondary schools or ten new GP-run health centres every year. Or that £100 million could pay the salaries of 3,000 nurses or 2,000 servants for a year,” Mr Brown said - announcing a full pay review in time for next year’s Budget

“For future civil service appointments and other managerial appointments to public sector bodies which are subject to ministerial approval, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury will approve, in advance of recruitment, all salaries above £150,000 and any bonuses above £50,000.

“And where senior managerial appointments are not directly under Government control we will expect the organisations in question to justify to the relevant secretaries of state and to the public any salaries above this level.”

Mr Brown said £3 billion of additional efficiencies had been identified since the Budget, just under half from streamlining central government, taking the total planned savings to £12 billion over four years.

More “value for money” measures are also set to affect several major projects including the multi-billion-pound NHS IT programme.

The PM spoke as he launched the so-called “Smarter Government” report setting out where savings could be made.

Among other measures included were merging or abolishing more than 120 arm’s length bodies, saving an estimating £500 million and relocating another 10% of civil servants out of the South East.

As part of a new “culture of openness” the numbers of civil servants under direct Whitehall control in each salary band above £50,000 would be published and all those earning more than £150,000 named, Mr Brown said.

“I would expect others - including publicly-funded media, regulators and other public sector bodies - to do the same,” he said.

Axing “expensive” civil service early retirement terms, reducing redundancy pay for top staff and preventing people returning to work after a pay-off would also save up to half a billion pounds over three years.

Hailing the potential impact of the internet, he said he hoped to make the “great majority” of government services online-only within five years.

Another £30 million would be spent to get at least another one million people online by 2012 in preparation, he said.

Online transactions were around £3.30 less expensive than those done by telephone and £12 cheaper than traditional postal versions.

Student loans, jobseekers allowance, working tax credits and and child benefit would be the first services to move, he said, with exclusively online vat returns and employer tax returns by 2011.

“Our aim is - within the next five years - to shift the great majority of our large transactional services to become online only - and this has the potential to save as a first step £400 million but, as transaction after transaction goes online, billions more.”

Mr Brown also promised a new “culture of openness” - in an apparent response to Tory proposals to publish far more government information.

“We will actively publish all public services performance data online during 2010 completing the process by 2011.

“Crime data, hospital costs and parts of the national pupil database will go on line in 2010.

“We will use this data to benchmark the best and the worst and drive better value for money. It will have a direct effect on how we allocate resources.”

Data to be released would also include previously unavailable public transport data and “significant underlying data for weather forecasts”.