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Lee Rotherham: Sealed can of worms that is Government waste
We are all used to waste. It's that last piece of bread that has gone stale at the bottom of the packet. It's the corner of the pie on your plate you just can't quite demolish. It's the £101bn our government frittered away last year. Hang on. How much?
This 101bn is an almost unimaginable amount. It would be sufficient to buy up enough wagonloads of Rembrandts to paper the outside of the Treasury building in Whitehall. It's enough money to give everyone in Sheffield their very own Rolls Royce Phantom. Or you could turn it into bullion, and put in an order for shipyards to make lifesize replicas of the Bismarck and Tirpitz and four other Second World War battleships, all made out of silver.
Where does this government waste come from, and how did we reach this frightening figure? Well, we basically audited the auditors, stockpiling cases and examples that had been identified as not being value for money. That includes buying in consultants at grossly inflated rates; PFI contracts that were ridiculously overvalued; or simply research projects at, for instance, the Ministry of Defence which have run wildly out of control.
Less clear are some instances where the payback from the spending is questionable. Let me share just one example that is a particular favourite.
Some 27m is being spent on the Bookstart programme, which provides young children and their families with free packs of books, and a "personal invitation" to join their local library. Yes, because when you are aged eight months, 18 months and three years, which is when you receive your packs, you are really such a social wallflower that an invitation is exactly what you need to demand learning skills from your literature-starved parents.
Over 2005-6, more than 450,000 Bookstart baby packs were delivered, and the mailings soon followed. An announcement has also been made that free books will be sent to children about to start primary school, and again when they begin secondary. Presumably, these further three million books will be automated and chase truants down the street.
Some of the latest titles include Peebo Baby, Go Wild With Colours, Wobble Bear Says Yellow, Little Kipper Splosh, Halibut Jackson, and for the Welsh speakers among us, Un Ted Mas o'r Gwely (One Fell Out of Bed). These sound like an ideal selection for rock musicians in desperate need of a name for their band.
But is this value for money? A cynic will question their impact, indeed ask whether they actually intrude into the role and responsibility of the parent. It looks more like an attempt by the government of the day to bribe parents – voters – with a free gift.
It's exactly the same principle as the "baby bond" or Child Trust Fund, also known as the state's "used car investment package for when you turn 18".
You might argue the toss over that example. The problem is that there are literally thousands more. A government department pulping 165,771 publications when it printed more than were needed. The millions spent on accident awareness in TV adverts, when ironically accidents dropped when advertising was cut. The bizarre thinking behind the switchover to digital telly, which kicks in at exactly the same time as do new regulations on waste disposal, threatening a television set mountain that will dwarf anything Mount Fridge ever had to offer.
Or there was the 82,424 refurbishing a ministerial suite; 1m on introducing OAPs to the internet; a 50,000 house manager for 10 Downing Street; 2.8m blown by Ken Livingstone on a propaganda newspaper; and a legal aid bill that has gone up by a third in a decade. Tot up the small and the large, and the sum total comes to a figure very much in the ball park of what even the European Central Bank estimates our government wastes annually.
But is such waste inevitable? No doubt some is. There will always be fraudsters in the social security budget. Mistakes will, at times, be made. But key features re-emerge.
The first is ownership. Once it has been collected as tax, there seems to be too little sense of responsibility of our money being accounted for. It is, after all, human nature to take less care of someone else's money rather than our own.
Worse, failure rarely seems to bring change, even in personnel. Too many people are promoted away from disaster, or get their bonuses regardless of the trail of devastation in their wake. It is quieter so.
Some institutions, particularly the big-spending EU ones, also have a culture of omWE are all used to waste. It's that last piece of bread that has gone stale at the bottom of the packet. It's the corner of the pie on your plate you just can't quite demolish. It's the 101bn our government frittered away last year. Hang on. How much?
This 101bn is an almost unimaginable amount. It would be sufficient to buy up enough wagonloads of Rembrandts to paper the outside of the Treasury building in Whitehall. It's enough money to give everyone in Sheffield their very own Rolls Royce Phantom. Or you could turn it into bullion, and put in an order for shipyards to make lifesize replicas of the Bismarck and Tirpitz and four other Second World War battleships, all made out of silver.
Where does this government waste come from, and how did we reach this frightening figure? Well, we basically audited the auditors, stockpiling cases and examples that had been identified as not being value for money. That includes buying in consultants at grossly inflated rates; PFI contracts that were ridiculously overvalued; or simply research projects at, for instance, the Ministry of Defence which have run wildly out of control.
Less clear are some instances where the payback from the spending is questionable. Let me share just one example that is a particular favourite.
Some 27m is being spent on the Bookstart programme, which provides young children and their families with free packs of books, and a "personal invitation" to join their local library. Yes, because when you are aged eight months, 18 months and three years, which is when you receive your packs, you are really such a social wallflower that an invitation is exactly what you need to demand learning skills from your literature-starved parents.
Over 2005-6, more than 450,000 Bookstart baby packs were delivered, and the mailings soon followed. An announcement has also been made that free books will be sent to children about to start primary school, and again when they begin secondary. Presumably, these further three million books will be automated and chase truants down the street.
Some of the latest titles include Peebo Baby, Go Wild With Colours, Wobble Bear Says Yellow, Little Kipper Splosh, Halibut Jackson, and for the Welsh speakers among us, Un Ted Mas o'r Gwely (One Fell Out of Bed). These sound like an ideal selection for rock musicians in desperate need of a name for their band.
But is this value for money? A cynic will question their impact, indeed ask whether they actually intrude into the role and responsibility of the parent. It looks more like an attempt by the government of the day to bribe parents – voters – with a free gift.
It's exactly the same principle as the "baby bond" or Child Trust Fund, also known as the state's "used car investment package for when you turn 18".
You might argue the toss over that example. The problem is that there are literally thousands more. A government department pulping 165,771 publications when it printed more than were needed. The millions spent on accident awareness in TV adverts, when ironically accidents dropped when advertising was cut. The bizarre thinking behind the switchover to digital telly, which kicks in at exactly the same time as do new regulations on waste disposal, threatening a television set mountain that will dwarf anything Mount Fridge ever had to offer.
Or there was the 82,424 refurbishing a ministerial suite; 1m on introducing OAPs to the internet; a 50,000 house manager for 10 Downing Street; 2.8m blown by Ken Livingstone on a propaganda newspaper; and a legal aid bill that has gone up by a third in a decade. Tot up the small and the large, and the sum total comes to a figure very much in the ball park of what even the European Central Bank estimates our government wastes annually.
But is such waste inevitable? No doubt some is. There will always be fraudsters in the social security budget. Mistakes will, at times, be made. But key features re-emerge.
The first is ownership. Once it has been collected as tax, there seems to be too little sense of responsibility of our money being accounted for. It is, after all, human nature to take less care of someone else's money rather than our own.
Worse, failure rarely seems to bring change, even in personnel. Too many people are promoted away from disaster, or get their bonuses regardless of the trail of devastation in their wake. It is quieter so.
Some institutions, particularly the big-spending EU ones, also have a culture of omerta. People are driven by frustration to become whistleblowers, and then the system crushes them. There's even an academically definable series of stages that people go through, from internal complaint down to the endgame of being discredited in unofficial briefings.
Some of these failings can be addressed with time and commitment. The problem, however, is that it is not necessarily in government's interest to fix them. If you are in charge, the last thing you want to do is admit the scale of waste you've created beneath you.
If you are a government minister, it suits your purpose to waste millions on propaganda adverts informing the public how busy you are on their behalf.
Besides, why bother? After all, the great thing about debt is that it's always your political successor who picks up the tab.
To order Bumper Book on Government Waste from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbook shop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.erta.
Dr Lee Rotherham is co-author of the Bumper Book on Government Waste, published by Harriman House.
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