“Value for money” is an everyday phrase in the civil service. But does Whitehall really practise what it preaches? All the processes government uses to prove it is seeking value for money aren’t worth anything if it doesn’t actually deliver it.
Whether officials manage a budget or not, the civil service code requires them to “make sure public money and other resources are used properly and efficiently”. And applicants to civil service jobs where “managing a quality service” is one of the dreaded behaviour questions will need to demonstrate their ability to “promote delivering value for money”. But signing people up to a set of generic values, then asking them about them in generic job applications, is hardly a recipe for efficient public spending.
In practice, it’s common to see value for money as someone else’s job: finances teams, the accounting officers who are responsible for the big budgets, and the Treasury. That’s not enough.
With high levels of spending, debt at nearly 100% of GDP, and the highest tax burden in decades, we’d expect to see world-class public services. Instead, everywhere, frontline public services are crumbling under pressure. Somewhere, the numbers don’t add up.
Part of the answer lies in the chancellor’s new Office for Value for Money, set up to help "realise the benefits from every pound of public spending”. But this will only work if isn’t just another Treasury team playing the same role that many already do – rushing to tackle the latest crisis and making the numbers add up in the short term. We published a paper outlining how to do just that on Monday.
Instead of doing the same job as everyone else, the new office should pick up the slack in areas that everybody else ignores. Lots of public value is lost because it’s a "tragedy of the commons" – it isn’t the job of any one person to solve it, so nobody does.
"Lots of public value is lost because it’s a 'tragedy of the commons' – it isn’t the job of any one person to solve it, so nobody does"
As a starting point: how do we stop departments shunting costs between each other by trying to get the best value for money in isolation, but in aggregate making terrible choices? An assessment of how to improve the overall value of systems that straddle multiple different departments, like social care or criminal justice, would make government decision-making much more effective.
Or how about evaluating the value of the civil service workforce, where government policy underpays the most talented officials but also tolerates the ongoing cost of many repeat poor performers who should have been managed out years ago? Even better yet, we should be benchmarking the performance of officials against the performance of AI – our research has found that we often hold automated public services to unrealistic standards for performance and bias, which human public servants would never meet.
New teams, units and quangos come and go in government, often at the whim of ministers. It’s easier to announce that a new one will fix all the problems, than do the hard graft of trying to fix them in the current system. But if it can bring in outside talent and expertise, and safeguard its time for neglected cross-cutting spending issues, then the Office for Value for Money could leave a legacy of better value for money in a system which, too often, knows “the price of everything and value of nothing”.
Joe Hill is policy director at the Reform think tank