Here’s an update to the British citizenship test: the applicant doesn’t have to answer any questions about flags, or when Robert Walpole was in power. Instead you are given a haircut, a meal and a bus ride home. The haircut makes you look old and weird. If you can look in the mirror and say, “Thanks so much, the asymmetric comb-over is exactly what I wanted,” you’re basically British. Then the meal is horrible. Are you going to send it back? Of course not, this isn’t America. If you can pat your stomach after a slab of room-temperature hogflesh and say, “Yep, all good thanks,” you are a citizen. Now the bus, on which someone is playing TikTok videos at full volume. Are you going to say something? No. You’re going to give up your seat and stand somewhere else in the hope they’ll notice that they’ve ruined your journey (they won’t). Because that is what we do in Britain: we spend money on things and then we massively regret it, without kicking up too much of a fuss.
This is a spending tradition that has long been part of our politics. We have ministers to announce new projects, and then we have the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee to tell us what an absolute carnival of ineptitude it’s been. Recently, some of our more innovative politicians have started to wonder whether voters might be happier if their taxes weren’t torched in quite such a cavalier fashion. This is why Labour, under Keir Starmer, created an Office for Value for Money, although this was found to be under-resourced (it wasn’t spending enough money to find ways to save money) and closed after a year, having cost £1.6m. It’s also why Reform politicians are, like the Doge unit set up by Elon Musk in the US, keen to root out any spending on woke things like saving energy or putting up the wrong flags. And it’s why Andy Burnham has made public control of costs central to his platform: privatisation didn’t get rid of the need to spend on water or social care, it just got rid of the ability of the state to provide those things on its own terms, which made them loads more expensive.
If you’re a tedious pedant with access to public spending information – and I am absolutely that person – you can spend your summer doing some dogeing of your own (it’s very important you pronounce “dogeing” correctly, though. Particularly if you’re in a lay-by). Resources such as the government’s own Contracts Finder show you contract awards as they’re announced; other platforms can show you receipts for how much the government actually paid for things. Then the full horror of British public spending can unroll before you.
A lot of the more egregious spending is on things the public sector should be able to do itself. For example, earlier this year Birmingham City Council awarded a contract worth up to £1.59m to consultants to support its Equal Pay Programme. But Birmingham City Council has significant expertise in equal pay; the council’s officials bankrupted their own city, losing well over £1bn, by failing to pay council employees equally (take a wild guess as to whether it was the women or the men who were underpaid). Surely they, of all people, understand the need to not do that again? But no, before you can say “sexist financial catastrophe”, it’s been outsourced to consultants.
Over at Nottingham City Council, officials have taken the bold step of outsourcing the job of working out how to do their own jobs, handing a six-figure contract to KPMG to tell them how to reorganise themselves. You can’t put a price on advice, though (unless you’re KPMG), and especially not at Nottingham’s council, which in 2023 issued a Section 114 notice (a “we’ve run out of money” notice). Nevertheless, officials have found £100,000 for a statue of Maid Marian on a roundabout, and £150,000 for a City Vision strategy to “establish Nottingham city centre as a bold, inclusive and future-facing urban core”. Community centres? Sorry. Libraries? Not this time. Oh, but vision? You cannot skimp on vision.
The social care system may be underfunded and understaffed, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t also a bit of cash for consultancy. Social Care Wales found £143,000 for some consultants to help provide “tools for nurturing positive cultures” and to “develop a theory of change”. Is it not difficult enough working in social care that these people must also be made to sit through a series of meetings about organisational culture?
Advertising is a major cost across the state, whether it’s the British Business Bank, which spent £5m on advertising to encourage people to borrow money from the government, or Westminster Council, which spent £1.47m to “develop a distinctive and inclusive brand identity” for some blocks of flats. But brand is everything, apparently: Sport England awarded a £105,000 contract to produce a “brand narrative” that would be – and I’m sorry you have to read this – “consistently understood, adopted and brought to life across communications, culture, teams and stakeholders”. Crazy idea, but: what if you spent the money on sport?
And why did the Competition and Markets Authority pay £200,000 to a social media influencer agency? True, it is the CMA’s job to regulate social media and the paid endorsements that fund the influencer economy. But what are they paying these influencers £200,000 to say? Perhaps: “Lowkey obsessed with the CMA’s proportionate monitoring and enforcement regime!”
Yet the Post Office spent even more – up to £960,000 – on PR services that included hiring influencers to improve its tarnished brand. But then again, it is the Post Office: they can just falsely accuse the influencers of stealing from them.
Are you piloting a tanker through rough seas off the coast of Scotland at night? Has the lighthouse keeper on the coast become unwell, leaving you to plough into a reef, coating the west coast of Scotland with dangerous chemicals? Don’t worry: the Northern Lighthouse Board (an arm’s-length body of the Department for Transport) has awarded a contract for £78,000 to sort this mess out. With a spare lighthouse keeper? Lol, no: that was the fee for a consultancy contract for crisis media management so that “in the event of a serious incident”, the Northern Lighthouse Board isn’t made to look bad on social media.
At times the wasted money is basically peanuts to a major economy: the £33,500 ceremonial mace and the two big gold coins, costing £74,000, commissioned by the Foreign Office in case Donald Trump visited the UK ambassador and needed to be distracted with something shiny, for example. The more serious question, however, is often: “Shouldn’t this just be someone’s job?” For example, the £1.83m contract I found for cleaning one school for three years, or the £10.5m contract to provide Send transport for just four students. The salaries and equipment needed for these services are obviously far less than the award value of the contract, and the work in many such contracts is done by agency workers on the lowest possible hours, at the lowest possible wage. While private sector procurement rose to £461bn last financial year, much of that money still goes into company management and ownership, draining the resources needed to actually provide the things we want from the state. There just might come a point when we decide to be somewhat less British about putting up with all this.
[Further reading: Andy Burnham is the Green Party’s biggest threat yet]