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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Blar Blar Blar! Self important tw*ts!
It is not made clear why carbon neutrality is the concern of a group dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion
That’s absolutely clear: Just Like COVID-19 and systemic racism, it’s part of the same pseudo-revolutionary scam by the same (kind of) people. They have some set of policies they want to see implemented (like favoritism towards groups they want associate with), some set of fortunately silent (or even yet unborn) pitiful victims on whose behalf they claim to be speaking (like the poor and oppressed or our childrend and grandchildren) and some ill-defined problem with supposedly apocalyptic consequences which urgently needs to be addressed.
The only sensible way to deal with this is to reject it. The purposes of politics is to improve the present and not, to solve problems of future generations before they even manifest themselves. Future generations will have to look after themselves once the time has come for that, they’re going to face problems we don’t have an idea of yet and will address them with means which haven’t been invented so far. People who are permanently stuck in the middle of the 20th century ought to consider relegating themselves to museums instead of claiming their ever more distant past would really be the future.
If you go back to 1923 it would be impossible to predict what 2023 would look like. —–The Internet. Aeroplanes, Cars, Lighting, Gas central heating, Massive rise in life expectancy, Freedom from preventable diseases, Appliances to bring an end to back breaking labour etc etc etc etc. Trying to pretend you want to decarbonise for the benefit of future generations that will be 3 times wealthier than we are is mealy mouthed eco posturing that tries not to admit what climate change policies are really about, and they are mostly not about the climate. The amount of politicians who bleat about their “children and grandchildren” is vomit inducing. Especially as these same pretend to save the planet people are doing their best to remove the very fuels they will need to have the standard of living their grandfathers and grandmothers currently have. because you cannot power industrial society on wind, sun, hydrogen or tidal. Constant brainwashing today has a whole generation of young people who are clamouring for their own impoverishment and infact they glue themselves to the road and “demand” it.
“Trying to pretend you want to decarbonise for the benefit of future generations that will be 3 times wealthier than we are is mealy mouthed eco posturing…”
On current trajectories and unless we stop the Davos Deviants one thing I can absolutely guarantee is that future generations WILL NOT be three times wealthier than we are, three times poorer most probably.
What is having a “disproportionately harmful effect on the poor and the oppressed” is denying them fossil fuels. One billion people in the third world have no electricity. ——–Just take a moment to contemplate that. ————NO ELECTRICTY.— This is a diabolical disgrace. The EU (climate activists supreme) at one point spent vast sums on the idea that they could cover the Sahara in Solar Panels and import that electricity back into Europe. What a total smack in the face for the worlds poorest. The phony planet savers would deny these poor people access to fossil fuels that would bring them out of the abject misery of a stoneage existence, and then steal their sunshine and cable it all back to the wealthy EU.
And denying them food by closing down productive farms in western countries.
And trying to reduce CO2 (plant food) levels to reduce crop yields, even though this is not possible.
Talking of heights of absurdity, yet possibly sound business sense and an eye for money…
By co-incidence, an advert appeared today in my inbox for Boom Technology, which is seeking share capital and other funding to re-introduce supersonic flight. The brochure ingeniously leverages the customer desire for all things Green, by explaining how really expensive the pre-Green fuel bill was for supersonic flight, yet somehow fudges the issue of how Green fuel is even more expensive than aviation kerosene. Presumably the target customer base is rich Green virtue-signallers who will be persuaded that they are Saving The Planet by flying supersonic, “because it’s Green, innit?” Presumably government employees will also be encouraged to fly the green flag by going supersonic whenever possible, especially if they are Important People.
Assuming this is not mere pamphletware and prospectus fluff, I wonder where the money will actually come from? Will it be from early investors and government funding rather than customers, rather like domestic solar panels and windfarm owners? Who will keep it financially aloft when the Green Mania wears off, like the Railway Mania faded in the late 1840s ?
… which reminds me. Railway Mania was partly the invention of new technology but also partly the result of collusion between MPs and venture capitalists that caused all manner of Acts of Parliament to be passed to support building railways, some brilliantly conceived, some hopelessly economically, some unfortunate gambles, and some outright fraud on investors. Surely MPs these days don’t stoop to taking bribes, or aren’t just gullible dupes, to support massive financial scams perpetrated on small investors and the general public….???
But didn’t I read somewhere that internet servers worldwide use about 10% of all generated electricity, so putting stuff on-line only contributes to the need for that power and despite what claims are made, not all of it is “green”. Please correct me if I’m wrong.