The UK auditor-general which last year refused to sign off the government’s accounts because they were “inadequate” warns public services are “not good enough and cost too much” and the present approach is “not sustainable to carry on”.
Britain’s public services are “unsustainable” because they are simultaneously not very good and very expensive, the head of the National Audit Office (NAO) has said. Gareth Davies said areas of public spending including education, transport, and most obviously health had massively increased in cost without actually getting any better.
He told Britain’s newspaper of record The Times ahead of a major speech on the state of government spending: “The way that the country has delivered quite a lot of public services is coming to the point where it’s unsustainable, both in terms of the quality of service for people, and the cost of the taxpayer… Services are not good enough and they cost too much. We can’t just keep on turning the same handle. We have to innovate. It’s not sustainable to carry on as we have been.”
But as well as blaming government for dwindling productivity — the measure of actual effect generated for each pound of taxpayer’s money consumed by these systems — the auditor also expressed his opinion there was a “big problem” in public perception. The issue, he said, was in “squaring what people would regard as decent public services with how much they’re prepared to pay in tax? Of course”.
Yet in some regards it is unfair to blame the public for not wanting to fork out even more of their earned money to the government. The tax burden has soared for years, most recently in Labour and Conservative tax-grabs but also in a less seen but nevertheless felt process of stealth taxation through fiscal drag.
As Davies himself observes, despite the public sector sucking in this vast quantity of new money, it hasn’t been able to produce more. So it will inevitably be hard to persuade the public that what is needed is even more of their money to get it right this time.
The NAO refused to sign off on the United Kingdom’s public accounts for the first time in 2024. It said it was unable to do so because of the poor state of accounting submitted to it — or not, in many cases — from Britain’s regional and local governments, covering the counties and cities.
As reported then, the NAO said it had received good accounts from just one-in-ten local authorities for 2022-23. The rest either didn’t submit anything, or what they did file wasn’t audited. “Severe backlogs” had been blamed for the failures.
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