A friend of mine once worked for consulting firm that won a government contract. For the next nine months he was deployed with a Whitehall department to support digital transformation projects.
The work started off well, but after a while, he and colleagues ran out of things to do, and began to be ignored. For the last several months, he would show up to the office and would sit, twiddling his thumbs, until his shift was over.
I didn’t believe government waste was that bad, the friend said, until I became the subject of it. He was staggered that the state would spend so much money on consulting fees and get so little out of it.
There will be countless more experiences, like those of my friend, of the government squandering taxpayer money. Which was why it was welcome when PM Keir Starmer said he would use cutting-edge AI to remove waste and make the government more efficient. But can he really find £45bn, the savings figure promised?…
