EVERY WEEK a drip, drip, drip of indecipherable figures. When is an NHS deficit terminally scary and when is it benign and easy to remove? Will identity cards cost £18 billion (as an LSE professor says) or £5 billion (as ministers say)? Why is more than £2.5 million spent on a team of 15 coppers munching their way through Paris to reinvestigate Diana’s death? For that matter, why is the bill for the Diana Memorial now approaching £5 million? Oh, of course, it ‘s a fountain, so it must be all those plumbing bills.
A failed Child Support Agency here, a non-firing rifle there: bureaucratic excesses add up. According to the authors of The Bumper Book of Government Waste, published next week, a fifth of all government spending is now wasted. You can take issue with some of their claims — it’s hard to judge, for example, whether the consultant who is paid £2,100 a day by the Department for Constitutional Affairs is value for money. He might be Einstein. And so what if MEPs claim their thermal baths attendance allowance for 21 days of the year? Shouldn’t they have it every day? Spending time soaking rather than legislating would be better value for money.
But a fifth or not, the very act of squeezing the whole, sad litany together into one book does concentrate the mind. Governments that get bloated find each extra mouthful increasingly indigestible: that’s the law of diminishing returns. Here are four symptoms of bloating to look out for.
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Negotiating to the death — or just to the next promotion
If I had signed the contract for the Bicester asylum centre that was never built — £12.4 million is being paid in compensation to the security firm that had a ten-year contract to build and run it and £12 million was spent on preparatory work on the site — you’d probably fire me. But Beverley Hughes, the first Immigration Minister in charge, is tipped to enter the Cabinet in the forthcoming reshuffle. And Des Browne, her successor, is now Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Onwards and upwards! Businessmen who negotiate private finance initiative hospital contracts tell me that the public sector officials rarely stick around long enough to see the first door fall off, let alone the end of the 20-year lease. There is no prize for the person with whom the buck stops.
According to the Public Accounts Committee one in three IT projects is not scrutinised properly. And they are the ones that lose huge amounts of money when they go wrong. If I had spent £50 million on Transport Direct, the public transport journey planner that recommended that travellers should wait at station platforms for six hours rather than take a 40-minute bus ride, you would at the very least want to make me sit on a freezing cold station platform for six hours rather than in some cosy office planning 2,500 other government websites. Yes, 2,500 — that’s job creation.
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Calling in the consultants
Consultants are much maligned, but in themselves are not the problem. They are merely a symptom of the rule that states that the larger a government department or corporation gets, the more consultants/tax specialists/technology geeks/powerpoint presentations it needs. The Ministry of Defence apparently has more civil servants than there are frontline soldiers. This may be why it negotiates such disastrous contracts. The National Audit Office found it was over budget by £2,700 million last year — and, according to the Bumper Book, the MoD even paid out £2.5 million for a battalion of imaginary troops. At times like that, they call in the consultants — and here the consultants are good value if they can get a grip.
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Propaganda
For months before the last election, my Tube platform was overwhelmed by a giant image of a baby on a City trading floor, informing me that I was about to receive state beneficence in the form of a £250 Child Trust Fund voucher. Since the vouchers were sent direct to everyone with a child born after September 2002, it was hard to see what the Government was plugging, except itself. The same goes for those ads that claimed to inform people about changes in employment law. They often read like exhortations to snatch longer holidays/more flexible hours/the contents of the stationery cupboard from your mean bosses because only we, the kindly Labour Party, really appreciate you. And we’ll spend more of your money to tell you that we’re spending more of your money, to show our appreciation.
Then there was the “preparing for emergencies” booklet. Remember that? No? The Central Office of Information, in a typically glossy report, states that this was “the most successful public sector door drop ever recorded”. Why? Because it landed on 26 million doormats. (Whether it went straight from doormat to bin is not recorded.) The COI is keener to crow about the “new visual identity” it developed, and the final series of ads that were broadcast “to alert people they should have had the leaflet, and telling them what to do it they hadn’t”. What a heroic effort to get the message out to the public that they should stock up on tinned food — and that an emergency was really, really unlikely. Government spending on advertising and public relations has tripled since 1997: a distinction is needed between recruitment ads for teachers and soldiers, and commercials that look like vanity.
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Parkinson’s Second Law
This is the rule that says that meetings, feasibility studies, vanity projects and pointless activity will expand to fill the budget available. Genuine mistakes — take the £22 million training centre for London firefighters that caught fire and had no smoke detectors or sprinklers — are inevitable when human beings are involved. What is infuriating to taxpayers is when money seems to be spent just because it’s there: on rebranding Nottinghamshire as “N” to replace the old Robin Hood logo; on plants for Ofsted’s offices at £50 a time.
It’s easy to laugh, of course. It’s also quite easy to cry. It’s strange that everyone assumes that public servants are always “covering their backs”. Who or what from? It would be a start if someone, just once in a while, was held accountable — and fired.
camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk