Earlier this week, just as Tory backbenchers were plotting and pantomiming over the Safety of Rwanda Bill, a much more interesting parliamentary event was quietly taking place.
Away from the main chamber, the Comptroller and Auditor General for the United Kingdom was in the Churchill Room in the bowels of Westminster, delivering a speech on how to boost productivity in Whitehall and the wider public sector.
Gareth Davies, whose role as head of the National Audit Office (NAO) makes him an officer of the Commons, told the audience of MPs and civil servants something that should make all the parties sit up and take notice: a more efficient state can free up billions of pounds for the public good.
The mild mannered Davies, who is every inch the former accountant he sounds like, was more than aware of the scepticism that often greets such bold claims.
Governments of all stripes often talk about a “war on waste” or a “battle against bureaucracy”. Back in 1980, Yes Minister even had an episode titled “The Economy Drive” and it featured ministers vowing to make sweeping savings only to be outfoxed by wily civil servants.
David Cameron (who happens to be just two days younger than me) remembers it too, so much so that he quoted the episode as opposition leader in 2008, declaring: “The Government ‘efficiency drive’ is one of the oldest tricks in the book. The trouble is, it’s nearly always just that – a trick.”
That didn’t stop either Gordon Brown, or Cameron himself (once in government), from claiming they could save many billions from better working in Whitehall – often while accusing each other of over-inflating the sums achievable.
The danger is that projected efficiency savings become ridiculed as yet another “magic money tree” to be shaken by politicians desperate not to be seen putting up taxes or increasing borrowing in the face of sluggish economic growth. But the fact is that serious sums can be – and have been – saved through better productivity in the public sector, although it’s far from easy (and far less easy than simply slashing spending).
Davies estimates there are “at least £20bn” in potential annual savings, including more than £7bn of savings from increasing competition in public procurement, £10bn from fraud prevention and £6bn in tackling tax evasion and avoidance.
Given the sheer scale of public spending – about £1.3tn a year on revenue and capital – that £20bn is less than 2 per cent of the total and the NAO believes that any large organisation should be able to achieve that kind of percentage.
Davies also suggests that proposed that “mega-projects” like HS2 and Boris Johnson’s programme to build 40 new hospitals should be overseen by new “cross-government oversight boards” to stop costs from ballooning. He points out that successful tech experts talk about building “dolphins not whales”, by which they mean creating manageable risks in scalable projects rather than starting with giant endeavours that are hard to fix.
Davies says the solutions include better data, sensible digitisation, more innovation and stronger leadership and questioning of progress. He says hiring the very best managers is key too, which sounds like a rare defence of their ability to save money rather than waste it.
The NAO chief is particularly keen on pointing out the false economy of not spending enough on maintenance of key public assets too, whether that’s schools, hospitals or flood defences.
As it happens, there was one area of public sector maintenance that was particularly close to home as he spoke in Parliament this week – the crumbling fabric of the Palace of Westminster itself.
In an interview for Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster, Davies tells me: “Parliament is running a very serious risk, actually, in the catastrophic failure of its systems. Maybe fire, maybe flood, maybe some combination [of both], which I know really does exercise the people with management responsibility for the safety of the building and the people who work there.”
The safety risks to all the cooks, cleaners, security and many other staff who work in Westminster, as well as the need to protect an historic building that belongs to all of us, get more pressing with every week.
When the Commons was last destroyed by fire in 1834, essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote that he witnessed members of the public not unhappy to see the blaze. “The crowd was…rather pleased than otherwise, whew’d and whistled when the breeze came as if to encourage it. A man sorry I did not anywhere see.”
I suspect, or at least hope, that a similar disaster would not prompt similar scenes of cynical disregard and instead we would be as traumatised as the French were by the Notre Dame fire. But more importantly, the cost of a rebuild would be enormous.
And MPs themselves have repeatedly increased the cost to the taxpayer of the planned “restoration and renewal” of parliament, precisely because they prefer to delay works by refusing to move out completely to another temporary location.
On one assessment, MPs refusing to budge while the works were carried out around them would add up to £22bn and take a staggering 76 years to complete. By contrast, the cheapest plan, for a “full decant” to another venue, would cost £7bn and take 12 years. MPs have postponed making a decision until after later this year, and few expect the cheapest option will be taken.
MPs understandably worry that cost estimates for every version of the Westminster refurb have ballooned over the years. And of course, at a time when schools and hospitals and other buildings are in desperate need of refurbishment or rebuilding, the Houses of Parliament seem like a less urgent recipient of taxpayer cash.
But if Gareth Davies is right, and we get a lot better and smarter at the procurement and delivery of infrastructure projects, maybe both parliament and our public services can get the money they need. A more productive state may not sound as sexy as Rwanda rebellions, but whoever wins the next election will need one.
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