We’re less than a week into the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding, and Spaff has already shone a light on hundreds of examples of government waste. So far, we’ve mostly focused on central government – and, no doubt, council officers throughout Britain have rejoiced at being left untouched by our watchful eye.
But no more. I’ve been looking at how some of Britain’s biggest councils have been spending their constituents’ cash. Here are some of my findings.
The first thing that shocked me is the sheer amount of money spent by local authorities on taxis – in large part for ferrying children to and from school each day. I’ll start with a particularly shocking figure: Birmingham’s bankrupt city council has spent almost £14.5 million on school shuttle taxis since June 2023. That’s the annual contribution of more than 10,000 council taxpayers in the most common council tax band in the city. And they’re showing no sign of slowing their rate of spending on this front either: nearly £4.5 million of that total came in January of this year. Other cities are no better. In January 2025, the top three taxi firms in Sheffield raked in £345,000, £172,00 and £160,000 of taxpayer cash respectively. Figures such as these seem shocking, but they’re entirely typical. Who voted for the remit of local authorities to be expanded to include hauling hundreds of thousands of children to school every day on our dime? Also likely not at the top of voter’s minds when they installed Labour last summer was the possibility of taxpayers coughing up for displaced private school students to be taxied to school, an instance of which has been reported by The Telegraph recently.
Bizarrely, council are also paying for yoga classes. In Birmingham, one particular company has received £51,000 since the summer of 2023. Leeds council has made dozens of payments in recent months to yoga teachers and companies, as well as for Zumba classes – spending £1,645 in a series of transactions at the end of last year. Why? One particular yoga teacher bankrolled by Leeds council offers ‘trauma-informed yoga.’
Another big outgoing: interpreters. In the last 18 months, council taxpayers in Birmingham have forked over just under £375,000 in fees paid for translation services. Leeds council, in the main, uses freelance translators – and doesn’t clearly label these in their disclosures, so an exact figure is difficult – but I found, looking at their spending last December alone, payments to interpreters offering their services for: Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Vietnamese, Thai, Mandarin, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Polish. Spending on interpreters and translators likely goes hand in hand with another large source of expenditure – illegal migration. Two big beneficiaries of Brummie taxpayer’s cash in this area were the ‘Refugee and Migrant Centre Ltd’, who took almost £2 million in the last 18 months, and ‘Refugee Action’, who’ve taken almost £5 million in the same period.
Some of the spurious spending is, unsurprisingly, just downright silly. Notable in this category are: £500 to an all-black female a cappella group, almost £7,000 for a jazz festival, £59,000 for the Kashmiri Arts & Heritage Foundation – all in Birmingham. My favourite highlight of the silly category of spending is, however, £100,000 for Sheffield Christmas illuminations – despite a large part of their benefit being lost when the switch-on ceremony was cancelled. I’ve also noticed dozens of payments to different branches of KFC by Leeds council, categorised as ‘social care’ spending. Are they feeding bargain buckets to the elderly? Similarly strange is £4,000 spent on office art, payments to Swarovski, and the £150,000 Sheffield council has spent on the city’s clean air zone.
The main conclusion I’ve drawn is that major councils are spending just as much on metaphorical rubbish as they are on disposing with literal rubbish. The expansion of the remit of local councils to include chauffeured school shuttles – to the tune of millions of pounds – has happened without any notable public debate. No voter has etched their cross on a ballot paper with that particular issue at the top of their mind. It’s a change that everyone, with the exception of taxi drivers, should oppose.
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