Government gives poor value for money

There is a strong case for saying that the UK government delivers poor value for money. Taxes and public spending as a share of GDP are historically high, yet many core services, such as healthcare access, policing outcomes, courts, schools and transport, show stagnant or declining performance indicators. The gap between inputs of money and staff, versus outputs of services delivered, and outcomes achieved, suggests weak productivity.

There is chronic capital mismanagement. Large projects often exceed budgets, miss deadlines, or are cancelled mid-way, locking in sunk costs without benefits. Frequent examples include rail schemes, road upgrades, defence platforms, government IT, and property refurbishments. Poor cost control, optimistic appraisals, and shifting scope drive overruns.

Procurement inefficiency comes from fragmented buying, limited competition, weak contract management, and risk transferred on paper but not in practice, all of which inflate prices.

There is policy churn and instability. Ministers, strategies, and targets change frequently. Rewrites impose transition costs on departments, local authorities, the NHS, schools, and suppliers. Short cycles prevent compounding gains from long-term reforms and undermine accountability for results.

Administrative bloating and duplication give poor vale. Overlapping roles among central departments, agencies, regulators, inspectorates, quangos and local bodies create duplicated back-office costs and compliance burdens that do not translate into better frontline services.

This is coupled with weak productivity management. Inputs have risen, including funding and headcount, but unit costs have often increased faster than measurable outputs. Limited use of time-and-motion data, activity-based costing, digital workflow metrics, and outcome-linked budgets means that inefficiencies persist unchecked.

Major programmes are still hampered by legacy systems, poor data standards, and underpowered delivery capability. Departments are judged on spending their budgets and avoiding adverse headlines, not on long-term value. ‘Use it or lose it’ year-end spending encourages low-value purchases. Few leaders face consequences for cost or benefit slippage.

There is centralization without coherence. Central control sets many inputs and targets while local bodies carry delivery risks. This blurs accountability, reduces local problem-solving, and encourages gaming of metrics rather than solving root causes.

Multiple overseers add process layers and paperwork. Assurance is focused on procedural compliance instead of whether programmes actually work, thus increasing cost with little effect on outcomes.

Policies are rarely subjected to rigorous impact evaluation or stopped when ineffective. Money continues to flow to legacy programmes owing to political salience, sunk costs, or lobbying pressure. Spending tilts toward acute services and crisis response. Preventive interventions in health, early years, housing quality, and crime reduction are crowded out, even where evidence suggests strong long-run returns.

Slow, uncertain approvals and complex compliance inflate public build costs for schools, hospitals, and energy, and raise operating costs for councils and the NHS. NHS spending and staffing have grown substantially, yet waits and throughput remain poor in many areas. Rigid pay bands, rota rules, and siloed budgets reduce labour productivity and block task-shifting and modern pathways.

Defence procurement problems are plagued by bespoke specifications, changing requirements, and limited competition. This produces extremely high unit costs and decades-long delays, reducing readiness and capability per pound spent.

In courts and policing there are backlogs, low charge rates, and uneven neighbourhood presence, all indicating that extra spending has not translated reliably into deterrence, resolution, or victim satisfaction.

Looking at housing and temporary accommodation, we see delays in planning that push families into high-cost temporary accommodation, a recurrent revenue burden that yields little social value.

Benefits administration features complex rules that create overpayments and underpayments, high administrative costs, and poor user experience, all of which undermine trust and value.

These problems persist because of fragmented accountability, political short-termism, capacity gaps in commercial and digital skills, limited competition, and low tolerance for experimentation. All combine to sustain poor value.

Some cost drivers lie outside government control, such as demographic ageing, imported inflation, and geopolitical shocks. The UK also does some things well, and comparisons must adjust for system design and data differences. Still, the recurring patterns above of high inputs with flat or weak outcomes, chronic project overruns, and poor incentive alignment, form a credible case that the UK government currently provides poor value for money.

Madsen Pirie