Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude says the current Government has already made savings of £3.75 billion through eradicating waste.

Maude made the statement in response to an article in The Times on 9 January entitled ‘Whitehall waste: the £31 billion cost of failure’ (behind Times paywall) which said that ministers needed to “address waste in Government processes to avoid billions more going down the drain”.

In the statement, he said: “When we arrived in Government we pledged to be ruthless in hunting down and eradicating waste in Whitehall and that is precisely what we have done. Just in the first ten months to last March we saved £3.75 billion – equivalent to twice the budget of the Foreign Office, or to funding 200,000 nurses.

“This has not been easy; spending hours renegotiating contracts, tackling vested interests and large suppliers and cutting back on spend on consultants and advertising does not make for glamorous or headline grabbing work. For the first time, we now take full advantage of the bulk-buying power Government has; this means that in stark contrast to the bad old days where different parts of Government bought separately and failed to get the best deal, we now buy together, reducing procurement spend by £1 billion so far and the new collective service means savings are expected to reach more than £3 billion a year.”

He added: “We’ve done a lot already, but I don’t plan to stop there. Our radical changes and the savings we have already made are just the beginning; we are now focused on making more sustainable savings, through cutting bureaucracy in the civil service and opening up public services.”

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