The Spectator launches SPAFF to expose the waste and abuse of UK public funds
RHODA WILSON
The Trump Administration launched the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”), led by Elon Musk, which aims to identify and cut out unnecessary spending, particularly in the field of foreign aid.
Inspired by what is happening in the US, The Spectator has launched an initiative, the ‘Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding’ (“SPAFF”), which is an online database that allows readers to browse government procurement contracts, credit card splurges and research grants to identify areas of wasteful spending.
In a free-to-read article, The Spectator explained how to stop the UK government from splurging our cash by helping to hunt down areas of government spending that need the axe. To do this, the public can use The Spectator’s search engine, SPAFF, for government spending.
You can read the article HERE and find the SPAFF search engine HERE.
The article also gives an overview of what has been discovered so far, some highlights of which are as follows.
Wasteful Spending Within the UK
Spending in the UK includes £446 million to the Arts Council which has been used to fund grants for projects such as a musical ‘Miss Brexit’ about out-of-work migrant actors (£30,000), festival of thrift (£650,000), a film responding to anger about another producer being awarded a Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (“MBE”) (£34,000) and a group aiming to “decolonise” pole dancing (£90,000).
Millions of pounds have been wasted in uncontrolled day-to-day spending. For example, the Cabinet Office’s £136,000 LinkedIn subscription and rent payments to the hot-desking company WeWork.
As in the US, diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) has become a black hole for UK public spending. The Construction Industry Training Board has paid £857,000 for a company to deliver DEI training for builders. It is also the cost of permanent DEI employees that is staggering. Across the public sector, the Government spends £427 million annually on employing 10,000 people in DEI roles. The NHS, for example, is currently advertising DEI roles with salaries of up to £123,000 per year, totalling nearly £14 million.
DEI isn’t the only wasteful or abusive spending of public funds by the NHS. Between 2020 and 2023, for example, the NHS spent over £3 million replacing nearly 7,000 lost iPads.
Private contractors on government projects have reported hundreds of thousands of pounds being spent on single reports for the Ministry of Defence with little oversight on value for money. Additionally, insiders have expressed frustration at procurement rules that force them to buy overpriced equipment from pre-approved suppliers instead of buying items locally.
UK Research and Innovation, funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, has been funding some questionable research projects, including a study on ‘The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000’ at the Birmingham School of Media, which received £841,830 in funding, and other projects such as “pregnant men” at Leeds University, ‘Glitching Cisgenderism’ at Northumbria University, and a study on human-robot interactions at Royal Holloway.
Some government departments are wasting money due to human error, such as the Department for Work and Pensions (“DWP”) paying over half a billion pounds in state pension and pension credit payments to dead people in the past five years.
Public inquiries have also generated significant questionable costs. The Covid Inquiry has so far spent £13 million on the ‘Every Story Matters’ project, £6.9 million on communications and private polling and £75,000 on “commemorative” artworks.
Taxpayer-funded quangos and non-governmental organisations (“NGOs”), which often undermine the government which sustains them, spend large amounts of money, with 176 employees earning more than Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party.
The Scottish government is also no stranger to wasting money. Creative Scotland spent £110,000 on a “hardcore sex show” and Scottish government officials spent £14 million on credit card transactions over three years, including yoga classes, a driving theory test and a VIP airport service for Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, and her staff.
Similar wasteful spending is found with local councils including £7,000 spent on DJ lessons by Croydon council, while others have splashed out on game consoles and football stadium tours to keep asylum seekers occupied. Astonishingly, councils across the UK have wasted over £1.7 million wasted on cancelled events since 2020.
The private sector is benefiting from bloated government contracts, with examples including the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (“DCMS”) spending over £150,000 on LinkedIn subscriptions and the Foreign Office paying half a million pounds for 15 electric Porsches to be donated to Albanian prisons.
Some citizens have benefited from government spending. There is a case of a Universal Credit claimant who received a £1,500 e-bike to help him find self-employment and a “neurodiverse” man (an autistic man) who was given a laptop to pursue a career in game design.
The National Audit Office (“NOA”), kind of the UK equivalent of the US’ DOGE, is perhaps the only arm of the British state putting up a fight against wasteful government spending. Led by Auditor General Gareth Davies, NOA has found significant instances of wasteful spending, including £3.2 billion wasted on faulty defence vehicles, £4.9 billion lost to covid loan fraud and £8 billion blown on ineffective NHS IT upgrades.
It’s not just obviously ridiculous wasteful spending that is slowly strangling the British economy; the continuously growing state is as well. An increasing share of Britain’s jobs are now in areas where the government is the dominant employer. In the past five years, employment in education, health and public administration has soared by almost a million but productivity per worker has fallen. According to the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, record public spending is keeping interest rates higher for longer.
“One economic estimate suggests that an efficient and trimmed-down British state could produce the same level of output for its citizens for £200 billion less each year. Enough to reinstate the winter fuel allowance 154 times over, build three HS2s or pay off a tenth of the national debt,” The Spectator wrote.
Dubious Foreign Aid
The foreign aid budget, currently standing at more than £13 billion, often benefits parts of the world richer than many UK regions. But there are instances where foreign aid is given to other dubious projects.
The Overseas Development Assistance (“ODA”) seems focused on the raising of taxes by other countries, The Spectator said. Projects include £21.5 million to transform Ethiopia’s tax system, £26 million to “build tax capacity” in the developing world and £23 million to “improve financial management” in Rwanda.
The UK government has also spent hundreds of millions of pounds on building ID systems in Malawi, Bosnia and 30 other countries.
The Environment Department has contributed £3.6 million to foreign aid spending on a project called ‘Championing Inclusivity in Plastic Pollution’ to ensure that negotiations for an international agreement on plastic waste are suitably “inclusive.”
Did you vote for any of this?
If you would like to help The Spectator expose the waste and abuse of public funds, search through the SPAFF database HERE and start digging.
This article (The Spectator launches SPAFF to expose the waste and abuse of UK public funds) was created and published by The Expose and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Rhoda Wilson
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