We have a UK Department of Government Efficiency, which politicians of all stripes have ignored (and why we must listen)

11 February 2025, 10:34 | Updated: 14 February 2025, 17:40

The UK already has a Department of Government Efficiency; politicians now need to use it.

Back in November, UK pollster Luke Tryll posted on X that with the creation of DOGE, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would be ‘so disappointed when they realise they’ve been given a more meme friendly equivalent of the UK’s National Audit Office’.

In one sense, Luke Tryll has been proven completely wrong. Two months later, DOGE’s profile could not be farther apart from our NAO. DOGE was the talk of the town at Davos. Barely a month into DOGE and USAID (circa $40 billion) is gone, an entire Agency. DOGE is making high-profile announcements that, it claims, identify fraud and mismanagement each day.

Yet, in an important respect, Luke Tryll hit on the truth. The UK’s National Audit Office publishes around 60 reports a year on Government performance and efficiency. It identifies huge failings weekly.

For example, it estimates that fraud and error cost taxpayers between £55 billion and £81 billion in 2023/24. That is the entire cost of HS2’s London - Birmingham leg in a single year.

There are plenty of other NAO examples to talk about. It recently reported that the cost of domestic violence every year in the UK is £84 billion. Again, each year. And tragedy plaguing tens of thousands of lives.

On departmental budgets – the NAO’s recent assessment of Ministry of Defence spending concluded that of approximately 50 active projects, only two could be given a “green” rating with the rest either identified as having serious shortcomings or being “unachievable”.

What is to be done? The NAO has assessed that we are misdirecting resources on a massive scale, but it took November’s election to make public sector efficiency newsworthy.

We are usually told that efficiency problems are intractable and/or Government is about as efficient as it can be (essentially, two sides of the same coin). Over a pint, journalists are blunter: Government efficiency is dull, and we have short political attention spans.

The truth is, there are few better examples of ‘talking right and governing left’ than the present predicament of our public services, the project Kemi Badenoch identified during her leadership campaign and has made it her mission to solve.

Another example: the UK has the longest tax code of any country in the world, so Prime Minister David Cameron established the ‘Office of Tax Simplification’ in July 2010 to eradicate inefficiencies in our tax system.

The OTS did not survive our recent series of Conservative governments. It was abolished in 2022 and never reinstated. When the OTS was first introduced, it simplified around 40 tax reliefs, but in its later years, recommendations were typically not followed. After more than a decade of the OTS, we still have the world’s longest tax code, with all the compliance costs, inefficiency, and confusion that entails.

We need more simplification, efficiency and productivity. Without it, there is no way out of Britain’s economic malaise.

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Tristan Honeyborne is Vice Chair of Research at The Society of Conservative Lawyers

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