Changing fashions in wasting taxpayers' money

Governments will always find ways in which to waste taxpayers’ money, but the fashions of how they do that change with the fads and fancies of each age. Twenty years ago, it was being spent on five-a-day officers, real nappy officers and walking officers. Some councils even had officers to go around reducing the number of holes in the salt shakers at fish and chip shops in an attempt to cut down salt intake. Maybe in some places money is still spent on such things.

Today, however, the fashion dictates that it must be spent on things such as decolonization, gender language modification, diversity awareness and ‘unconscious bias.’ Some even pay to have their staff attend courses in critical race theory and ‘white guilt.’

This is all in Milton Friedman’s fourth quadrant. You can spend your own money on yourself, your own money on someone else, other people’s money on yourself, or other people’s money on someone else, which is the fourth quadrant. Since it is other people’s money, the cost does not concern you all that much, and since it is being spent on someone else, the quality is not paramount to you either. This is basically the public sector of the economy, in which legislators and bureaucrats are spending taxpayers’ money on other people.

Because it is not their money, they can spend it like water on fashionable causes, and are prone to be influenced by minority pressure groups urging expenditure on things that matter to them, rather than to the population at large. The general public probably regards these fashionable causes just as novel ways of wasting money.

Given these endemic pressures, it might be thought that little can be done to curb wastage, but there are ways of minimizing it. One is surveillance. If there are organizations exposing it and highlighting it, with media doing the same, it is exposed to mockery, and Government Ministers will order it to be curtailed to avoid the embarrassment of allowing it to happen on their watch.

It can also be curbed by having departments focus on the priorities, the things that matter. By establishing a scale of priorities, they can concentrate resources on what is important, rather than on what is not. This process must be done publicly, under scrutiny, and in consultation with the public at large by the use of reputable polling organizations. Once this is done, it will be difficult for Ministers in the Commons to defend spending money on the fripperies rather than on the things that people think are important.

During a cost of living crisis, when the population has to cut back on unnecessary spending, it is important that government plays its part, and is seen to play its part, by doing the same.