| Welcome to the world of waste. You are about to enter a twilight zone of crazy spending, political correctness, utter incompetence, and fantastic jollies all funded by the British tax payer – and by tax payer, we mean you.
It’s easy to forget that all this money has to come from somewhere, even if ‘Central Government’ or ‘The Council’ is coughing up for it. It’s also easy to look at some of these chaps and say, “Bully for you. If you can wrangle a County Council expedition to Ulan Bator or snaffle some tickets to some World Cup final in your trim Armani suit, then well done!”
But remember: it’s you who’s paying for the privilege. All this money doesn’t grow on trees. Well literally it does as it’s made from paper. But in reality it comes from tax. Which means it could be going somewhere else.
Maybe it could be used to stop the wing of your local hospital from being closed. Or supporting the fire engine that’s being moved somewhere further away, and less flammable. It could go towards putting that extra bobby on your street so you don’t have to keep coming home and finding your flat burgled. Or maybe – crazy thought here – that money could be staying put in your pocket so you can spend it how you like, on a part of your life that affects you, like a pension plan for instance.
In this book, the authors have highlighted a myriad, indeed a veritable plethora of examples of Government waste and useless spending, taken from thousands of examples held on file. The figures have been compiled from official reports, media coverage and Government statistics – none of which are entirely trustworthy, but which at least give us a conservative estimate of the amount of money going down the plughole. Added together, they come to £81 billion of wasteful and useless spending. That’s more than the annual turnover of nineteen European countries. Or put another way – more than £4,000 per family in Britain.
If you wasted your family’s money on this scale, you would probably be locked up. So why does the Government think they can get away with it?
Waste in this case is defined as everything from Government extravagance, such as Lord Irvine’s wallpaper (£400 per roll), to overspending on Government projects, such as the NHS national programme for IT (NPfIT), which is fives times over budget and will deliver an outdated product if ever completed. It doesn’t even play Minesweeper.
It also covers what can be considered to be useless spending – money spent on schemes or initiatives that might do some good, but where the value added by the scheme falls well short of the cost to tax payers. A classic example is the Department of Trade and Industry, which delivers output but is poor value for money.
Government waste is, of course, a subjective term. But as it’s taxpayers money being spent it seems a good idea to let the tax payers see where the money is going and then let the tax payers decide whether it’s wasteful or not.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT 
Published by: HARRIMAN HOUSE