How to stop the government splurging our cash

All too often, the Prime Minister recently lamented, Britain’s public servants are happy languishing in the ‘tepid bath of managed decline’. There is, however, one area in which Britain’s public servants are dynamic, innovative and world–leading: at spaffing gazillions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on wasteful projects which are variously inane, insane and indefensible.

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The British state makes the average drunken sailor look like a model of frugality. When William Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he earned notoriety for his pursuit of ‘candle end’ economies – no saving was too trivial if he could leave money to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’. His contemporary equivalents in the Treasury seem to delight in emptying those same pockets and taking lit torches to taxpayers’ cash as though it were so much kindling.

Of course, all modern states are afflicted by bureaucratic bloat to some extent. But in the US, the Donald Trump administration has set about a modern Gladstonian revolution by going line by line through government expenditure and identifying scope for savings. The initiative, named the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), is led by Elon Musk. ‘Doge’ is a play on an internet meme, the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. But while the name may sound like trolling, the intention is deadly serious. Musk is taking the same remorseless approach to cutting out waste that he did at Tesla, SpaceX and, latterly, Twitter/X, where he got rid of four-fifths of the staff. His zero-tolerance campaign has already identified countless examples of unnecessary spending – especially in the field of foreign aid.

Inspired by his example, we at The Spectator are launching our own war on wasteful spending. We’ve established a search engine to help Spectator readers join us in hunting down areas that are in need of the axe. Where the US has Doge, we can have the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding (Spaff). Our online database allows readers to browse the wastelands of government procurement contracts, credit card splurges and laughable research grants. Spoiler alert: there’s no shortage of material.

Take the foreign aid budget, currently standing at more than £13 billion, and often benefiting parts of the world richer than many UK regions. Our Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) seems focused on the raising of taxes by other countries. Projects include £21.5 million to transform Ethiopia’s tax system, £26 million to ‘build tax capacity’ in the developing world, and £23 million to ‘improve financial management’ in Rwanda.

We also fund projects to solve problems in the third world that we can’t handle ourselves. When The Spectator highlighted how hopeless Britain is at counting its own population, some called for ID cards and digital verification. It turns out that we’re already spending hundreds of millions of pounds building such systems in Malawi, Bosnia and 30 other countries, because as what was then DfID put it: ‘proving one’s identity is essential to accessing core services’.

Back home, our government likes to spend money on the arts. The Arts Council (total budget: £446 million) dishes out grants to support ‘the arts, museums and libraries in the UK’. Its funding database includes £30,000 to a ‘movement lecturer’ so she could put on Miss Brexit, a musical about out-of-work migrant actors; £650,000 to the ‘festival of thrift’; and £34,000 to a ‘socially engaged practitioner’ tomake a film in response to her anger about another producer being awarded an MBE. It also gave £90,000 to a group that aims to ‘decolonise’ pole dancing. Losing the will to fight, the government recently dropped its defence against Kneecap, a Belfast-based Republican rap group, which had had its £14,000 art grant blocked.

Government departments waste millions in uncontrolled day-to-day spending too. Analyse the Cabinet Office’s procurement card spend and you find a £136,000 LinkedIn subscription and millions in rent payments to the hot-desking company WeWork. Meanwhile, the Department for Education bought a hard drive for £524 for an ‘Ethnography film’ (there are 747 options on Amazon for less than £100) and has spent thousands on ChatGPT subscriptions. Some citizens benefit though: the Department for Work and Pensions bought one Universal Credit claimant a £1,500 e-bike after he persuaded his MP it would help him find self-employment, and job centre staff bought a laptop for a ‘neurodiverse’ man who wanted to be a games designer. Last March His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, presumably not trusting their own IT team, bought a £1,000 subscription to the website haveibeenpwned.com, which tells you if your email addresses have been found in data breaches. Dig into Home Office spending and you find a trip to an escape room in Kent for Border Force staff and bus tickets for illegal migrants to make sure they can report to police stations while on immigration bail.

The UK government’s ‘commitment to transparency’ reveals these spending sprees through procurement card records – though they often leave much to the imagination. Some of them are revealingly descriptive– the MP and the e-bike or the autistic games designer – but other civil servants simply omit all detail. For instance, another look at the last month’s DWP procurement card spend reveals an £859 payment to John Lewis, £4,758 of payments to Screwfix and a grand spent at Argos, all with no explanation given in the ‘transparency data’. Some spending records accidentally include a ‘comments (not to be published)’ column revealing that the rationale behind each spend is being deliberately hidden.

There seems no part of the state that isn’t beset with inefficiencies and wasteful spending. Local councils, not to be outdone, have taken creative expenditure to new levels. Leaving aside bus tickets for those who are about to be deported, some authorities are using grant cash on driving lessons and theory tests for refugees. Croydon council spent £7,000 on DJ lessons, while others have splashed out on games consoles and football stadium tours to keep asylum seekers occupied. What’s more, upcoming analysis from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, seen by The Spectator, reveals that councils across the UK have wasted more than £1.7 million on cancelled events since 2020: 624 events have been cancelled, at an average cost of £2,821 each. Barnsley council – which has a £25 million overspend – spent £9,000 preparing for a Barnsley FC promotion party. The team lost the playoffs.

While local councils do their best to waste taxpayers’ cash, the private sector is raking it in through bloated government contracts. The government’s contracts finder is another gold mine. Search through this database of procurement opportunities and you’ll discover the DCMS has just spent more than £150,000 subscribing to LinkedIn. The Foreign Office paid half a million pounds to buy 15 electric Porsches to be ‘donated to Albanian prisons’ by the embassy in Tirana, while Trinity House (the official lighthouse authority) bought four of Elon Musk’s Teslas in December – though electric cars are not known for their seafaring capabilities. Meanwhile, the Construction Industry Training Board – funded by a tax on construction companies and managed by the Department for Education – has just paid £857,000 for a company to deliver diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) training for builders.

DEI has become a black hole for public money. Research by Conservative Way Forward reveals that £427 million is spent every year employing 10,000 people in DEI roles across the public sector, on an average salary of £42,000 per annum. DEI training is taking up one million working days every single year, at a cost of £150 million. The Environment Department, meanwhile, has contributed £3.6 million to foreign aid spending on a project called ‘Championing Inclusivity in Plastic Pollution’, to ensure that negotiations for an international agreement on plastic waste are suitably ‘inclusive’.

There are staggering wastes of money as a result of human error too. In the past five years, the DWP managed to pay more than half a billion pounds in state pension and pension credit payments to dead people.

Another rich source of frivolous funding is UK Research and Innovation, funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The department funds many important studies and research projects that no taxpayer would argue with. Yet there’s also a fair amount of spending that seems frankly ludicrous. The Birmingham School of Media successfully applied for £841,830 of funding up to 2027 to enable ‘The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000’, to answer the question of how ‘erotic citizenship echoes or complicates narratives of cosmopolitanism, human rights, equality, social justice, and pluralism’. Leeds University managed to wangle half a million pounds from UKRI to study ‘pregnant men’, Northumbria University secured £186,000 of funding for their project ‘Glitching Cisgenderism’; while Royal Holloway got funding to examine whether ‘screened depictions of love between robots and humans legitimately contribute to debates regarding the socioethical implications of human-robot interactions’.

Public inquiries generate their fair share of questionable costs too. The Covid Inquiry (£150,000 per day) has so far shelled out £13 million on the ‘Every Story Matters’ project, which asks everyone in the country to submit their ‘Covid story’. It has spent £6.9 million on communications, private polling and £75,000 on ‘commemorative’ artworks.

Taxpayer-funded quangos and NGOs have become sprawling contradictions that often undermine the government which sustains them. These arms-length bodies spent £33 billion last year, with 176 employees who earn more than Keir Starmer, according to the Telegraph. Some of the charities and organisations receiving public funds openly oppose government policies. Refugee Action, which received £18 million, condemned the Rwanda asylum plan as ‘racist at its core’. The Refugee Council, which called the same policy ‘cruel and unworkable’, was granted £27 million. Meanwhile, Stonewall – which has criticised nearly every government initiative on gender policy – has received millions from public bodies over the past five years.

As is so often the case, things are even worse north of the border. Creative Scotland dished out £110,000 for a ‘hardcore sex-show’ to be staged in a ‘sex cave’ starring ‘leather-clad Daddies’. During Holyrood’s inquiry into Alex Salmond, £55,000 of taxpayer cash was spent on training civil servant witnesses. And over a three-year period Scottish government officials managed to rack up £14 million of credit card spending including on yoga classes, a driving theory test and a VIP airport service for the then first minister Nicola Sturgeon and her staff, which aimed to treat them ‘like royalty’. Smaller transactions incurred by the SNP government included a ‘home disco’ bought from eBay and six copies of Sturgeon’s book Women Hold Up Half the Sky.

Across the UK, healthcare is staggeringly inefficient. In the roughly ten minutes it will take you to read this article, our NHS will have spent around £4 million; every day it spends £500 million. Despite health service productivity being 19 per cent lower than at its pre-pandemic level, as the ONS revealed this week, the NHS is still advertising DEI roles on salaries of up to £123,000 a year at a total cost of nearly £14 million. Right now a search for ‘inclusion’ on the NHS jobs site yields 2,484 results, while typing in ‘equality’ returns nearly 3,000 postings. Between 2020 and 2023 more than £3 million was spent replacing nearly 7,000 iPads lost by ambulance staff.

Private contractors on government projects speak of hundreds of thousands being spent on a single report for the MoD and a lax ‘here’s the money, do what you want’ attitude with little to no oversight on value for money once contracts are awarded. Insiders express frustration at procurement rules that force them to buy overpriced equipment from pre-approved suppliers instead of buying items locally. Meanwhile, one Whitehall official explains how new spending descriptions like ‘surge outsourcing’ and ‘professional services’ may already be being used to bypass controls on consultancy fees brought in at the end of last year.

The National Audit Office is perhaps the only arm of the British state putting up a fight. Gareth Davies, Britain’s auditor general, said last week that the country’s public services are ‘too expensive and not good enough’. That’s a bit of an understatement. In the past few years, his organisation has found that £3.2 billion was wasted on faulty defence vehicles, £4.9 billion was lost to Covid loan fraud and £8 billion blown on ineffective NHS IT upgrades. The NAO is meant to work a bit like Doge. It makes important findings, but these are too infrequent to tackle the scale of the state’s wasteful spending.

It’s not just that we waste money; it’s also unfortunately the case that the return on what we spend is shrinking fast. The Bank of England dropped a bombshell last week, revealing that they’d overestimated Britain’s already weak productivity. Since March, the number of workers has grown by 450,000, but there has been no economic growth, forcing the Bank to slash its productivity growth estimate by two-thirds.

The Bank blames the growing state, pointing out that an increasing share of Britain’s jobs are now in areas where the government is the dominant employer: education, health and public administration. In the past five years, employment in these industries has soared by almost a million, but productivity per worker has fallen. In other words, the more people the state hires, the worse it gets at doing anything. And because public-sector employment keeps expanding, the drag on overall productivity grows with it.

The largest spending increases recently have been in health and welfare. Yet NHS productivity remains below pre-Covid levels, because record public spending is keeping interest rates higher for longer, according to the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey. One economic estimate suggests that an efficient and trimmed-down British state could produce the same level of output for its citizens for £200 billion less each year. Enough to reinstate the winter fuel allowance 154 times over, build three HS2s or pay off a tenth of the national debt.

So the problem isn’t only profligacy – it’s stupidity. Britain’s bloated public economy is no longer just a concern for auditors and thinktank wonks. Public services are groaning under their own inefficiencies, growth has flatlined, and taxpayers are left footing the bill for spending that ranges from the baffling to the downright absurd. Their pounds are stretched thinner than ever, often to fund projects that defy logic and value. Reform isn’t a polite idea any more – it’s a national necessity. Our nation can no longer afford to spaff it all away.

How do we stop Britain’s bureaucratic bloat? Michael Simmons and Lord Agnew joined the latest Edition podcast to discuss: