The next Government will inherit a long list of ‘big nasties’29 Mar 2024 21:41
The next Government will inherit a long list of ‘big nasties’ from the Conservatives which will cost hundreds of billions of pounds to clear up, a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, warns today.
After a year when her committee examined projects across Whitehall, the NHS and schools the chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Dame Meg Hillier, lists what she calls a catalogue of “big nasties – essential spending which cannot be put off”.
The list includes failed projects to tackle crumbling schools, hospitals, public health laboratories, outdated IT and renewing and refurbishing Parliament.
She warns: “All too often, we have seen money misdirected or squandered, not because of corruption, but because of group-think, intransigence, inertia, and cultures which discourage whistle-blowing. On occasion, the scale of failure has been seismic, such as HS2 or Horizon in the Post Office, or the procurement of PPE during Covid. Other times, there has been a systemic failure to be agile and adaptable as events unfolded.”
Unless this is tackled she warns: “my successors as chair of the PAC will be doomed to a cycle of broken promises and wasted cash in perpetuity.”
The report produces eye-watering shortfalls of money showing where short-termism by the present Government has worsened the state of public services.
In schools instead of spending £5.3 billion a year to refurbish or replace crumbling schools attended by 700,000 pupils, the Treasury cut this to £3.1 billion a year increasing the backlog.
In the NHS the backlog of crumbling hospitals has jumped from £4.7 billion to £10.2 billion after the NHS raided the capital programme to keep patient services going. Despite spending £178.3 billion a year patient services are worse, waiting lists longer, particularly for cancer patients who need urgent treatment.
A delayed £530 million programme to modernise public health laboratories which handle the most dangerous diseases such as Ebola and Lassa fever will now cost £3.2 million. Failure to implement it “would present a significant risk to public health,” says the report.
The report says a decision not to decommission 20 nuclear submarines which have been withdrawn from service since 1980 has left the ministry of defence with a £500m maintenance bill and it has run out of space of where to store them. The ministry now has a £7.5 billion future liability to dispose of them.
The Ministry of Justice now has a £900 million maintenance backlog on the prison estate and plans to create 10,000 new prison places have only seen 206 new places.
Some £100 billion of spending by local councils remains unaccountable because of a shortage of auditors and councils like Birmingham, Nottingham, Slough and Thurrock have gone effectively bankrupt.
CONTINUE...
Sign In
Follow the stocks
