Is there any word more laughably misapplied than ‘tsar’? We have already had an ‘antisemitism tsar’ and now we are going to have a ‘value for money’ tsar. Had you suggested to a Russian peasant that their monarch was value for money I suspect you might have ended up floating on the Neva River alongside Rasputin. Admittedly, that is not David Goldstone’s official title – we are supposed to call him Chair of the Office of Value for Money. But he does come with a CV that includes involvement in all kinds of public projects associated with tsarist excess. He was in charge of the delivery authority for the London Olympics, which came in at £9 billion, four times over-budget. He went on to head the London Legacy Development Corporation which was great value for West Ham Football Club, who wereshanded the stadium on a plate, though not so much for taxpayers, who were forced to stump up a further £190 million to convert an 80,000 seat athletics stadium into a 60,000 seat football one.
Then he was put in charge of the Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal Delivery Authority, which hasn’t actually done any restoration work yet but which did pay Goldstone a £168,000 bonus on top of his £311,000 salary More recently, in June, he was appointed to the board of HS2. That last appointment, it is fair to say, was long after the high speed line had reached new heights for wasting public money, but the confirmation that HS2 will, after all, be tunneled to Euston makes you wonder whether we are yet finished with the extravagance. If Goldstone was worth his salt as a cost-controller you might have expected HS2 to have come back to the government with a cheaper proposal to get trains running to Euston, such as overground, like the French do with their TGVs on the last few miles into Paris Instead, HS2 Ltd has continued to push the argument that now the government is committed to building the leg of HS2 from Old Oak Common to Birmingham it might just as well sign off on the rest of the project to Euston.
So what will we taxpayers get in return for Goldstone’s £49,400 salary for one day a week’s work? His job description says that he will be answerable to the Chancellor and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, but it is really no more than an advisory role. He is not really going to have his hands on the tiller of public expenditure, and his voice is inevitably going to be drowned out by those in political posts. Is he really going to intervene to stop any further above-inflation pay rises for public sector workers without any requirement for the unions to agree to improved working practices? If the government is going to save taxpayers’ money it is only going to happen if those who really do have control of coffers start off with the right attitude. And that seems to be sorely lacking in the governments’ decisions so far.
Such are the state of the public finances that sooner or later Britain is going to need rather more than stuffed suit advising it on how to save money – we are going to need a Javier Milei figure as Prime Minister: the Argentine president who wielded a chainsaw at his election rallies to symbolise what he was going to do to public spending. But it may take a while yet for the public to accept that.
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