Most people start adult life in much the same way: education, training, work. You may gain a qualification, you may not. It may lead to a job or a profession. If things go well, it leads to decades of what is optimistically described as “satisfying and rewarding” work.
Your working life is then possibly spent keeping up with repayments on the loan that gave you that qualification, profession or vocation. Rent or a mortgage will follow. One thing is certain throughout this bittersweet symphony of life: you will pay tax. You may consider this as your contribution to the common good, and how tax is spent on that common good is determined by those in government.
Tax is paid directly or indirectly on just about anything and everything an individual earns or consumes. Many people therefore start off on the back foot, in debt, and caught up in this cycle, with little or no time to think about, question, or make sense of whether that tax is being spent wisely.
When ‘wisely’ becomes a luxury
‘Wisely’ may be a value-laden concept and people have different views on what their taxes should be spent on. Increasingly, though, that choice is limited and is determined based on need, be that care for the elderly, education, or the interest on an escalating national debt.
The legacy of increasing government debt, and the need to ensure public services are funded such that they can at least function within pre-determined constraints, is simply to keep the leaking ship that is the UK afloat.
Given this dilemma, the government’s fallback position is always to make even more use of its ‘hard-working’ resource, the taxpayer, who must work harder or tighten their belt that bit more simply to keep their head above the water as the tax take inevitably increases.
The price of debt
According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), we can expect debt interest in 2025–26 to rise to £111.2bn. This represents more than enough to have delivered one – or more – much-needed and now-shelved hospital in Leeds. Instead, interest repayments go to the money lenders.
This really begs the question about how the debt got so high in the first place and the quality of the decision-making in Whitehall that got this country into the financial mess it is in.
Borrowing and its consequences
Government is run differently and borrowing is used to invest in public services, with returns of a different kind delivered at some point in the future. But where debt, and the interest repayment on that debt, is more than can reasonably be repaid, the government is storing up problems for the future. So, surely it is time to look at the billions that are wasted within government departments?
Waste in plain sight
Let’s briefly examine where a proportion of taxpayers’ money gets wasted.
The National Audit Office (NAO) states:“We estimate that fraud and error cost the taxpayer £55 billion to £81billion in 2023–24. Only a fraction of this is detected and known about.”
Debt and waste of £161bn identified (unless there’s any duplication in the figures I have quoted) in less than one hour’s online research!
That is more than one hospital, and possibly the tip of the iceberg in terms of waste and inefficiency.
This doesn’t even begin to consider the concept of value for money.
Out of touch
Is it any wonder MPs are thought to be out of touch with reality? MPs earn a basic salary of £93,304 (as at 1 April 2025). By way of contrast, here are average salaries in the UK, by age:
The average tax paying Briton is now having to work for nearly six months of the year to fund the state.
A personal diversion
One of the government agencies my former employer sought to work with was the Highways Agency, as it was then known. That was before it became Highways England, and then, after another money-wasting rebrand, “great british highways” (note the trendy lack of capital letters).
The contractor was told it had to adopt ‘Lean’ and, if it didn’t, it would be excluded from the list of contractors that could bid for work. The contractor was being told to deliver value for money and to prove that it did.
Isn’t it about time the government learnt how to deliver value for money itself? It cannot rely on the hapless taxpayer to stump up ever-increasing amounts of hard-earned money for it simply to be wasted.
- NHS & PFI debt
- Ministry of Justice (just one example of waste, to keep it simple)
- NAO: Getting contracts right and responding if they go wrong
- Home Office dumps Fujitsu
- HS2 NB £2Billion wasted on cancelled phase 2 works
- Northern Powerhouse Rail (one to watch)
If this kind of thing happened in business, those responsible would be out of work. The British public is being treated with nothing short of contempt.
Brexit – the biggest SNAFU
When it comes to out-and-out financial waste, the biggest SNAFU of all is, of course, Brexit. The Constitution Society published an assessment in 2025 of the economic impact of Brexit, nine years on. They concluded, “GDP, trade flows and investment have all been curtailed by barriers to trade with the EU” and that new trade deals cannot compensate for these losses. The authors judge that, “The costs of Brexit are likely to be permanent, with the economy continuing to be 4 per cent smaller into the future (if we take the OBR’s assumption). Given the fact that FTAs [free trade agreements] will not make up for Brexit, and the EU also signs trade deals, that means that future British governments can only significantly offset those losses, or eliminate them, through reintegration with the European economy.” Brexit has reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, investment by 12% to 18%, employment by 3% to 4%, and productivity by 3% to 4%.
In addition to these losses to the economy, Brexit is costing the UK a cool £250mn a day in lost tax revenue.
Further wastage
Beyond Brexit, as if that wasn’t enough, even cursory research across government departments reveals further, massive wastage, such as that in the NHS, in DEFRA, Highways and DWP. In this last department, the headline is £1bn in incorrect payments, clearly indicating that internal controls cannot have been effective in the first place. A fundamental principle of business is ‘right first time, every time’. The way the DWP spins its internal incompetence is staggering. It is the system that is not fit for purpose, not the customer. This one example could fund all 650 MPs salaries for the next 16.5 years, before accounting for inflation, continued mismanagement, incompetence and waste.
The waste continues to add up
We can add the Ministry of Defence (wasted at least £13bn since 2010) and the Home Office (“billions squandered”) to our list of shame.
The failure to tackle incompetence and inefficiency within government departments is a root cause of why the country is in the economic mess it is in. No amount of tax revenue from new housing will solve systemic waste.
If we restrict ourselves even just to the reports referenced above, the figures are eye-watering: The NHS, £2bn; DEFRA, “hundreds of millions”; Brexit – unquantifiable, but a lot!; MoD “at least £13bn”; and the Home Office “billions”.
The Office for the Value for Money, RIP
In autumn 2024, the government set up the Office for the Value for Money. It is now closed, having identified £14bn per year in efficiencies. It clearly can’t have had a focus to drive out waste within government departments. This article alone identifies far more. A substantial amount of tax revenue (more than £160bn) is effectively lost to government waste and debt interest. Of the £273bn raised from around 38 million taxpayers, the average contribution is roughly £7,200 per person each year. On that basis, £160bn equates to the entire annual tax contribution of about 22.2 million people. In other words, the tax paid by more than half of all taxpayers each year is absorbed by debt interest and waste within government departments.
So, would you rather service debt or have one or more new hospitals?
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