In her much-anticipated Spring Statement, Britain’s greatest ever female Chancellor has announced a £3.25 billion transformation fund to bring down the costs of running government. We’ve seen from the US in the activities of Elon Musk’s Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE) how to cut government spending. Already the US has scrapped USAID saving billions, it looks like all DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) employees in the US Government are being fired and a few days ago Donald Trump signed an executive order to close down the Department for Education. But what about the British approach to getting value for money for British taxpayers by making our public services more efficient?
I’ll just give one example of why we are unlikely to see any real savings in the British public sector. Apparently we have an Office for Value for Money (OVfM) in Britain. The OVfM was set up in Rachel Reeves’s ‘bankrupting Britain’ October 2024 budget and “provides advice to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Chief Secretary to the Treasury to ensure that value for money is at the heart of Government’s spending decisions“.
The brilliant Rolls-Royce-brained civil servants at the OVfM have noticed that the Government is spending a fortune of our money on procuring short-term accommodation for homeless Brits and for all the doctors, engineers and scientists pouring across the Channel in small boats each day in spite of Mr Starmer promising to “smash the evil people-smuggling gangs”. So the OVfM has set up a “VfM (Value for Money) Study on procuring short-term residential accommodations”.
Here’s the problem explained in the terms of reference for the groundbreaking Value for Money study:
The unit cost of short-term residential accommodation increased significantly in recent years. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) reported in 2024 that per asylum seeker costs had increased by 141% from £17,000 in 2019-20 to £41,000 in 2023-24. Private sector suppliers of short-term residential accommodation have made record profits in recent years, leading to accusations of profiteering. There is also evidence that some forms of short-term residential accommodation have a detrimental impact on children and families.
If I were involved in this work, I would start by informing all providers of short-term accommodation that, due to the country’s financial difficulties, the Government expects all providers of short-term accommodation to cut their prices by say 25% and that any who fail to do so would be removed as providers. Of course, there would be howling and screaming and many providers would claim this would bankrupt them and would insist that what the Government was demanding was quite impossible. But as we head into recession, hotel owners are unlikely to find many customers quite as generous and reliable as the UK Government. In addition, pour encourager les autres, I would launch police investigations into a couple of those suppliers suspected of profiteering. Suddenly, on seeing the police investigations, what the providers previously claimed was impossible would become possible and the 25% price reductions would magically materialise.
I was involved in a slightly similar situation many years ago. A major car manufacturer demanded all parts suppliers cut their prices by a few percent and threatened that the car manufacturer would send in a team from our consultancy to ‘help’ any supplier who refused. At first, of course, we got the howls and screams of pain from the parts suppliers that the car manufacturer’s demands were impossible and would bankrupt them, leave them homeless with their children starving and so on and so forth. I actually led the analysis team which was sent into the first parts supplier to claim that it was impossible for him to cut prices. The last thing any parts supplier wanted was us consultants poking around in their businesses and financials. Seeing our team descend on one parts supplier, a miracle seemed to happen as suddenly the other suppliers managed to deliver the price cuts the car manufacturer wanted thus avoiding a visit from us consultants.
But this is not how our OVfM will operate. Instead the OVfM explains:
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury will oversee the study at a ministerial level, supported by the Deputy Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. …
A senior official group, with representatives from relevant departments, will oversee policy development and the recommendations to ministers. This study will be resourced by officials from the Office for Value for Money, the Home Office, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Justice and HM Treasury, with input from the Cabinet Office and the Government Commercial Function. …
The study will be informed by engagement with local authorities, the Local Government Association, the Centre for Homelessness Impact and other relevant experts.
As for how long the Value for Money study will take, we’re told:
The study will inform decisions at the upcoming Spending Review, and progress to the following timetable:
- June: publication of the study’s outputs in the Spending Review
- February-March: policy development
- April: update to the ministerial oversight group
- May: Spending Review negotiations
- The OVfM will consider the outputs of this study as it develops options for system reform.
I would humbly suggest that this British Value for Money study doesn’t quite show the same urgency and proclivity to action that we see from Elon Musk’s DOGE.
Moreover, I rather suspect that this supposed Value for Money study led by the OVfM will be such a multi-departmental bureaucratic mess that it will achieve the square root of zero. In fact, I further suspect that our 500,000 civil servants are mostly so lazy and useless that they will have to call in eye-wateringly expensive management consultants to show them how to do the study and to hold their hands during the study. Furthermore, I imagine the study will include several ‘offsites’ at expensive hotels with excellent restaurants to encourage the participants to do blue-sky, out-of-the-box thinking, facilitated, of course, by specialised ‘blue-sky-thinking’ management consultants.
Then we must remember, that this first phase till June 2025 is just to develop some ideas on how to cut the cost of short-term accommodation. If these ideas are approved by the relevant Government Ministers, the OVfM will then have to start planning how to implement their genius cost-cutting ideas. That should take at least another few months, again probably assisted by £100,000-plus a week management consultants. And finally the whole thing will drift into 2026, other priorities will take over and little to nothing will ever be achieved. So, in the end, the OVfM study to get value for money procuring short-term accommodation will probably cost us much more than it ever saves if it ever saves anything at all.
But you may well disagree. You may believe that the dynamic and motivated civil servants at the Office for Value for Money are about to achieve the kind of economic miracles this country has seldom seen, make massive savings and make the British Government so streamlined and efficient that it will be the envy of the world, just like our ‘envy of the world’ NHS with its seven million-plus waiting lists and its tendency to overuse Midazolam on the troublesome and expensive-to-treat elderly and frail in order to shorten those waiting lists.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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By proposing a police investigation into an undefined offence of “profiteering” the author disclosed his socialist economic views. Even in the mad bad days of Prices and Incomes policies the police were not sent in to harass businesses whose prices the politicians did not like.
If Markets work freely then police aren’t needed. The trouble is most civil servants haven’t a clue what happens outside their canteens. When offered a deal they inevitably accept anything and rarely negotiate. (I know they are always meant to get 3 quotes, but industry can easily provide this and still run rings around them).
So ‘profiteering’ does happen because one side is ill informed. In business to business that is life. When it is giving away public money there needs to be some checks and balances.
The answer of course is far fewer civil servants, but of a much higher standard.
When I worked in the Civil Service every office had a member of staff responsible for “office costs management” or something similar. Basically they were supposed to review the costs of “jobs” in the workplace. In nigh on twenty years I met only one person, a bloke who had any hands-on skills like changing light bulbs and the like
Re-wiring a plug, painting a wall or plastering a wall, replacing windows – no chance. Pointing out these deficiencies would be met with a stare that simply said ‘what are you on about?’
Result? Changing light bulbs could cost £100 a pop. And people like me who knew how to use complicated tools like screwdrivers etc were never, ever allowed to tackle any jobs even though the amounts saved would have been astronomical.
Civil Service equals waste.
And price controls never work.
I’m stunned at the reaction to your comment.
The police aren’t supposed to be gangsters at the service of the government for intimidating private citizens into some arbitrary compliance.
Worse still, the suggestion is that the government itself is so useless at procurement that the police should be unleashed on ordinary people by the government to fix its own incompetence.
WTF.
The British people are already footing the bill to the tune of £106 billion for the vainglorious aspirations of its warmongering UK governments. Another three billion pounds a year in military assistance is being sent to Ukraine even before “official” British boots are on the ground and UK planes in the air above west Ukraine. (Many UK military personnel are already there as “advisors”).
And the increase in military spending projected by Starmer over the next decade cannot possibly be funded without massive cuts to public services and other state investments. That is the least the bond market would demand for continuing to purchase government debt.
When British and European troops come home in thousands of body bags, politicians who supported the move will hopefully be decimated at the ballot box.
The British people are funding the Ukrainian Banderites, neoNazis, paramilitaries and ultranationalists at the expense of its own taxpayers, pensioners and the vulnerable when, if the facts were known, Russia were totally “justified” in the actions they have taken against Ukraine and the UK and EU are backing the wrong side.
Our ‘thriving democracy’. I don’t recall voting and agreeing to spend £106 bn in the Uketopia for Zelensky and his money laundering/war mongering regime. I don’t recall voting for the Rona Fascism, Netard Zero, Open borders, nor on spending £100 billion p.a. on invaders who want to destroy my country.
Apparently I live in a ‘thriving democracy’ where 20% of adult votes gets you a massive parliamentary/pharmamentary majority.
Blighty’s mushrooming £2,800,000,000,000 accumulated national debt arguably derives from three principal absurdities…
…Excess public spending on handouts to HMS Blighted’s freeloaders who can’t even be arsed to pull an oar, aboard the vast flotilla of life rafts towed along in Blighted’s wake
…Public squandering on folly, like the £400,000,000,000 sluiced away on Stopping the Spread of the respiratory virus with age-fatality profile comparable to general mortality
…Burgeoning debt-interest payments, currently of the order of £100,000,000,000, as annual collateral damage of aforementioned follies
Predictive of more of the same only worse, as ever more passengers who can’t be arsed climb aboard for a free ride and the next state-sponsored iceberg looms up ahead of Blighted’s prow – anyone for £22,000,000,000 on CARBON CRAPTURE..?
Go figure, Vice-Admiral Theeves.
It’s the aggregate cost of the welfare state since 1948 and the bureaucracy needed to administer it.
Agreed – “accumulated national debt”
As I keep stating, it is difficult not to conclude that all this state profligacy is intentional. At some point the decision to declare this country completely bust has to be taken – the real reset.
“If I were involved in this work, I would start by informing all providers of short-term accommodation that, due to the country’s financial difficulties, the Government expects all providers of short-term accommodation to cut their prices by say 25% and that any who fail to do so would be removed as providers.”
I stopped reading at this point.
David Craig demonstrates he has no understanding of how a free market works – supply/demand/price. With some exceptions, as demand increases, so does price. This encourages more supply to meet demand because there’s money to be made.
Price caps or imposed price restrictions ALWAYS results in a supply shortage. Repeat, ALWAYS.
Those residence suppliers evidently can make more profit renting to Government than the public market. Change that and they have no incentive to rent to Government. Incentives matter.
I suppose Mr Craig’s next step is Government commandeering private rental property.
The way to reduce Government spending:-
1) Abolish the welfare state and NHS. (Bonus mass exodus of cultural enrichers, etc)
2) Deregulation of society and the economy which will result in a contraction of snout 80% of the parasitical bureaucracy needed to administer regulation and think up new regulation.
3) withdraw from all international bodies, organisations, committees,etc with huge savings and stop foreign aid.
4) Default on the national debt, to bring about deflation because no money printing to service debt, no future debt as nobody will lend, no interest on the debt, no need to tax to cover it.
That’ll be the day the music dies.
Pity you were so busy you didn’t read to the end before your comment. Otherwise you might have noticed that I tried to explain that as Britain was in recession (GDP/capita) there was no market for all the hotel rooms the Government is using our money to pay for. I guess I must be old-fashioned as I generally read the full article before I decide whether to comment.
Pity you don’t understand that if there is an excess in the market because demand is lacking, that is a misallocation of resources and those hotels should go out of business so capital and resources can be better used elsewhere in the economy.
That’s what happens in a recession so that there can be an internal economic adjustment and new economic activity can emerge to bring the economy out of recession.
Preventing this deepens recession – see FDR’s New Deal – just pickles the problem in aspic.
Government buying up those rooms means the taxpayer is being plundered to keep those businesses afloat. It is a subsidy that distorts the market, perpetuates misallocation of resources – and makes people poorer meaning they buy less which reduces economic activity which deepens recession.
Unless we are to accept that those hotel rooms will be kept at the expense of the taxpayer in perpetuity, one day if subsidy is withdrawn they will bankrupt… suddenly.
Furthermore, those hotels in order to get Government contract at the agreed rates, fire most of their workforce, because Government doesn’t require daily cleaning and servicing of the rooms, porters aren’t needed to carry luggage, and the food menu is restricted, no bars and there isn’t waitress services.
So pity that!
I like your 4-Point Plan, which seems very sensible to me.
I don’t understand why so many other commenters didn’t.
Magic Money Tree – dieback disease.
Already the cost of borrowing for the UK is going up and up, it seems that the magic money tree has a terminal dieback disease, The UK may have trouble cutting public spending but as the magic money tree shrivels up, we may find that public spending is cut for us.
Nah. It’s the square root of -1, i. Otherwise known as an imaginary number.
I suggest the problem is not so much one of reducing accommodation prices as one of reducing the number of immigrants. I would not dispute that that is hardly an easy task but one could certainly start by turning all those dinghies around and escorting them back to the French coast.
German’s car manufacturer BMW also has a policy of essentially terrorizing its suppliers by regularly demanding price cuts, which may or not be justified. Companies will only survive long term if they can build up a certain financial buffer to protect them against unfavourable times. If they are forced to accept one price cut after the other, then the first thing to suffer is quality and the second thing is to bring the company ever closer to bankruptcy. There is no question that German cars are not what they used to be …
Just axe all expenditure not benefiting British people. So stop paying to accommodate and feed illegal immigrants, and end foreign aid. Get rid of this net zero rubbish. Abolish useless quangos such as the OBR.
I would humbly suggest that this British Value for Money study doesn’t quite show the same urgency and proclivity to action that we see from Elon Musk’s DOGE.
Another depressingly sclerotic waste of time. It’s hard not to feel ground down by the sheer inertia of incompetence and convoluted machinations, which comprise our government.
Value for money can be achieved by providing only basic accommodation. Shelter, food, sanitation, security (from each other). Done. Establish an ID for them – appearance, biometrics, DNA. Real asylum seekers expect things to be better than where they’ve fled from. Something better than a camp on the North French coast is a very low bar.
The British definitely have a soft spot for accents. I remember thirty years ago they were moving a lot of call centres to Scotland, especially those concerned with debt collection. The idea was that the average Englishman hears a Scots voice and starts quaking in his boots. These days it seems to be nasal accents that the feebs respond to. Both her and Starmer are high on nasality and low on IQ and everything else. Don’t be seduced by a nasal accent it is not a good look. Would you ever listen to someone from the Black Country or West Bromwich? No of course you bloody wouldn’t.
Nah. I always thought it was the stereotype of the miserly Scotsman. ‘Careful’ with money so they’ll be careful with yours too.
The difference is that Elon’s DOGE is about stopping doing things that are a total waste of money where here Rachel The Incompetent’s bunch are tasked with trying to make stupid things cheaper.
It is like trying to clean a fish tank that has immense amounts of quickly regenerating algae all over it. You wipe it off and another layer appears. You can’t wipe away the fear. If you watch a film about how a British peasant responded to the duke steling his wife away from him the duke being about a foot taller and the distillation of the peasant’s nightmares. It is very sad because without this tendency the English could become a very effective people again.
There is only one way to cut government spending on health, social care and benefits. That is to crerate a healthier workforce. And the way to do that is – you know by now:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379311083_The_Microbiome_and_the_Entropy_Paradox_An_Evolutionary_Perspective_Food_Nutrition_Journal
Please find a way stop people like her being your gods. Maybe it means you have to give up the money worship, Is the money worship really worth it given the squalid existence that it has led to in your life? Just work a little bit harder, a few more hours in a far worse job. If you carry on doing that then things will work out for the better. Consider the logic and dynamics of such an approach within a predatory system. They will eat you for breakfast over and over again.
Honestly record your own voice and see it if sounds any different from Rachel’s from accounts. Lets face it she is you and you are her.
They’ve tarnished the image of morphine and benzodiazapines. Midazolam is a nice sleepy drug in the right doses. A shot of morphine is lovely. And yet all that these people can do is associate these blessed substances with death.
Personally, I think the UK can’t send enough money to Pakistan and what better way to increase this further than to finance them building another airport?
But more importantly, who the heck is Shaggy Banker?
https://x.com/SamanthaTaghoy/status/1906001493997547538
“The last thing Britain needs is direct flights from the region that produced the Pakistani rape gang perpetrators.
Unless it receives more deportations than departures, we’re not interested.” Connor Tomlinson
The Office for Value for Money is one of those governmental Orwellian creations which will deliver the opposite of the stated intention.
Just like the Office for Budget Responsibility … and the rest of the Quangos.
Ofgem. Lowe should target them
It’s the law of supply and demand in operation.
The Government is permitting the slo-mo invasion to both continue and accelerate, knowing that there is insufficient long-term accommodation for the invaders, so hotels are the only option (in their eyes … personally, I’d put them in tents somewhere cold and miles away from civilisation, up in the Highlands).
The owners of the accommodation can therefore increase their prices, knowing that they have (a) regular demand and (b) a “customer” which will pay whatever it is told is the price
The solution isn’t to “come down heavy” on the accommodation supplier. It’s to stop the requirement for hotel accommodation by shipping the criminal migrants straight back to France.
But, since the Government is deliberately facilitating the invasion, it isn’t going to do that.
“If I were involved in this work, I would start by informing all providers of short-term accommodation that, due to the country’s financial difficulties, the Government expects “
Them to shift for themselves inside a fenced old airfield with a supply of tents and some camping stoves and basic food supplies (rice & beans?).
Why would any country in its right mind charge 20% vat? The working British people have been screwed for so long they treat it as normal.