Labour dossier documents nearly £30bn of government spending waste

Labour has released a dossier documenting what it describes as nearly £30bn in wasted government spending during Rishi Sunak’s time as Chancellor and Prime Minister. Rachel Reeves said the document was a “badge of shame” for the Prime Minister, adding that over his period in government “billions of pounds that could have transformed Britain were instead handed over to fraudsters and crony contractors”. The document is broken down into 100 areas where spending was wasted. The big ticket items mostly relate to the pandemic, with the largest single listing being waste on PPE: overpaying on purchases, buying unsuitable or unusable materials and failing to use PPE before its expiry date. Labour estimates this to have cost the taxpayer around £7.94bn.

This release constitutes another push on Labour’s plans for an office of value for money (which Reeves describes as being one of the party’s tools to “root out waste and make our economy stronger” along with its fiscal rule commitments). It is also clearly another attempt to punch the bruise on Conservative waste and cronyism and summon the spectre of the pandemic-era scandals that dealt body blows to Boris Johnson’s premiership. A particularly notable example of this is listing the cost of the specially constructed No 10 briefing room (clocking in at a cool £2.6m), forever associated in the public’s mind with the infamous video of former Downing Street press secretary Allegra Stratton laughing about government knees-ups.

As with Labour’s attack on government procurement card spending last month, some of the listings make for more convincing hits than others. Covering the cost of pre-existing contracts to school fruit and vegetable suppliers during pandemic school closures, for example, is few people’s example of shocking negligence (most of the food spend was written off and some redirected to charities). Overall, however, the release gives a picture of a government with no handle on spending or consideration for waste, ripe to be exploited by contractors looking to make a quick buck. It does indeed seem, as Reeves puts it, that Rishi Sunak, “the man whose job it was for three years to scrutinise this spending, never lifted a finger to stop the money being thrown away, and in many cases, ignored direct warnings of the risks”.

Given how much of the waste documented relates to the pandemic and former Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s brief, Labour will probably not be too unhappy with the Telegraph‘s big scoop today, even if it does end up eclipsing their own attack line. The paper has obtained thousands of WhatsApp messages from Hancock’s time in office at the height of the pandemic, which it alleges document a litany of failures, most notably the failure to take expert advice on the handling of care home testing.

It’s St David’s Day, and marking this on LabourList this morning we have a piece from Welsh economy minister Vaughan Gething, who writes for us about how Mark Drakeford’s government is planning for Wales’ future: “A stronger, fairer Welsh economy will be built by all of us, which is why we are striving to move positively with the developments that are shaping a changing Wales.”