Government waste is back in the headlines

By: Elliot Keck, head of campaigns

For twenty years the TPA has been by no means a lone voice in the battle against government waste. But we’ve often felt like a lonely voice. We’ve often been told that waste is inevitable in a large bureaucracy and that there’s nothing anyone can do about it, so it would be better to focus on more ‘important things’.  

There have been flurries of interest in cutting down on government waste during the last twenty years, most recently with Labour’s sudden enthusiasm for counting every penny of government spending during the dying days of the Conservative government. But over the last year or so we’ve seen a more sustained interest driven at home by the work of journalists such as Charlotte Gill and of course abroad by the work of Elon Musk and DOGE.

As a result, the waste and inefficiency that is endemic at every level of the state has been given the sustained, consistent attention it deserves. From counterproductive EDI spending to virtue signalling foreign aid projects, it’s clear that bureaucrats have nowhere to hide.

In just one of the many latest revelations, we at the TPA have identified over £10 million pounds of grants handed out by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) for research that is unlikely to deliver value for money, to put it politely. Below is a selection of what we found. We’ve also thrown in the “Europe that Gay Porn Built”, which Charlotte Gill so brilliantly identified - a list of weird and wacky grants simply wouldn’t be complete without it. A selection of these were published in The Sun - story here - but here is the full list:

Now looking at this list, there are probably two broad categories. One is grants that at the very least have good intentions. Take, for example, the £628,313 for promoting inclusivity in pension protection. The abstract of the research, by the University of Southampton, notes that “For older individuals from particular Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities, later life comes with a higher risk of having low financial resources and experiencing poverty compared to White British persons”. Good start. But what will the methodology be for unpacking this issue? Well, “Through an innovative, mixed methods approach which involves statistical analysis of two national datasets… and qualitative interviews with mid-life and older persons from BAME communities... Ahead of the interviews, respondents will be sent disposable cameras to take pictures which, for them, show what financial planning for later life means. These photos will form the centre of the interviews, allowing respondents to talk through their lived experiences and perspectives, and share insights which may not have been captured by academic research before.” Excuse me?

Then there is the complete, undeniable nonsense, funded merely to satisfy the virtue-signalling instincts of activist bureaucrats and academics. The one focused on by The Sun, correctly, was the research by Coventry University into online dance. But there’s also over £300,000 to “develop a culture of indigenous research-based filmmaking” in India and a project to connect the “International LGBTQ community” with “arts experiences in the UK.”

This is unsustainable. The tax burden is heading towards a record high, the national debt is soaring and state spending is at 45 per cent of GDP with pressures on spending only set to grow. 

The message to Labour ministers is crystal clear: politics at the most fundamental is about the exercise of choice. It’s how humans of an ideologically diverse community make decisions about how to use the limited resources they have available to them, given there will never be 100 per cent agreement on their use. While Labour ministers may support many of these projects in principle, do they really think it is the best use of money for our research budget? Or that the cash is better used to study “Gender in foreign policymaking: the academic and policy implications of feminist foreign policy” than to increase defence spending, hip operations or police patrols? 

And if they fail to recognise there is a trade-off, why are they in politics in the first place?