By Elliot Keck, investigations campaign manager
October was a month of horrors. And no, not just Halloween. But the prospect of tax rises are set against the backdrop of another bumper month of TPA waste-gathering. Some claim there’s no more fat to be trimmed. Taxpayers must think they live in a different universe.
For October, the NHS was definitely the villain when it came to our waste watch. Our investigation, published in The Telegraph, found that NHS bodies had upped their spending on spin doctors to £57 million. There are now 1,000 communications officials working for the bloated health service. And this only scratches at the surface because dozens of trusts and CCGs didn’t provide data.
Things only got worse for health bosses when another investigation found that over £600,000 of diversity jobs were advertised in October alone. What happened to needing more nurses?
Elsewhere, after repeated stories of failing quangos, with passports and driving licences delayed for months, we decided to have a poke around at working practices within this alphabet soup of organisations. It turns out that since the pandemic, the number of quangocrats who can work from home full time has increased by 50 per cent, to 11,000! Our quote for the Daily Mail’s exclusive on our investigation called for office space to be sold off if workers won’t return to the office.
Next month, we’ll be revealing some council stinkers, environmental hypocrisy, wasteful wokery and much more besides.
Most of our investigations come from tips offs, both great and small. Do you know of any taxpayers’ money being wasted? Email me at [email protected]