Questioning senior civil servants today on central Government spending on consultants... The lack of private-sector business competence, drive and ambition in the civil service is quite astonishing.

Just look at the smugness of this halfwit that Mr Lowe is interrogating. They haven’t got a clue how many BILLIONS they are spaffing up the wall and couldn’t care less either. They all need to be sacked off and replaced with competent people. The whole system is rotten.

There's a reason why these people work in the civil service. They can't run a business themselves and they have no emotional bond with the money they spend. They simply piss it away. Consultancies like Deloittes are grifters who suck on the teet of the taxpayer.

Thank you Rupert. You're the only thing I feel positive about politically in the UK right now.

"We set a budget, and then forget about it and just guess everything for years a time and hope nothing breaks"

Did I hear that correctly, “We estimate how much we might spend, set that budget and then wait and see if we spent it all”????

Do you have the actual figures ??? “Well I can ask for it but we Currently work off estimates”. “Ok well if you can ask for it.. get it and then we’ll have the real conversation because you’ll be business meeting ready” !!

When you question them i always sense panic ! So glad you are there to literally make them finally uncomfortable when asked for truths! 👏

Petition to rename it: The Civil Disservice

I have a contact at the DWP and they cannot believe the incompetence that is prevalent. Their work ethic does not mix with them and is struggling to deal with it.

They are completely & utterly clueless on how expenditure should be measured, tracked, justified, reduced and so on. Going on about faith in annual R&A is garbage. Monitoring costs, paid by our taxes, should be a continuous process. I did this for a living & absolutely despair.

Cat Little the civil servant answering Rupert’s questions has a salary band of 180k to 200k!, just hold that thought. Rupert has been posting clips from these meetings, by now you would have thought those in charge would have worked out he expects to hear detail on numbers.

She says if I asked for it, they would give me it, but I didn't ask for it. So they made up an "estimate" and didn't ask for amounts they could have easily been provided with? I smell bullshit...

Mr Lowe's work ethic and range of interests is impressive compared to the vast majority of MPs who don't seem greatly concerned how taxpayers money is spent. And he does it all for nothing.

It astonishes, and alarms me, that these well paid people cannot answer basic questions. They are attending a committee to do that very thing. One can only imagine that they are so arrogant it is a shock to meet with Rupert Lowe. A man who actually understands balance sheets!

If they don’t spaff their budgets they lose it the next year. That’s the issue.

Rupert great stuff but you are dealing with a bunch of amateurs here! How can they manage with this lack of visibility and control it’s pathetic!

I was dragged to a recreational lunch with a Whitehall figure responsible for overseeing a very large (NHS) computing project. Hearing what I did for a living, he keenly questioned me. I was astonished how low his expertise was. He had no tools to understand what was happening.

What the hell are they doing with our tax money? Why do they need 39 strategic mega Corp consultancies on board? Really awful performance here.. She has no idea month to month what is going out

If she worked for me she would have been sacked for incompetence , in fact what is her actual job? When it’s not thier own money they don’t care what they spend it on as long as thier pockets are full, the whole gov is a shit show

Cost of government 'consultants' will be infinitely higher than £1.3 billion; government hides consultancy costs via very dubious methods. It's very lazy and incompetent management which would not be tolerated in the private sector.

That is an enormous waste of tax payers money and she doesn't even know. Thats an insanely huge bill. And she says she'll ask for it. Why is no one auditioning the civil servants, cus that an absolute insane bill for the tax payers money along side illegal immigrants.

Who is this woman? I have never heard such a word salad to answer a simple question!

Government should be run on a real-time live accounting system that any Citizen can get access to at any time!

One thing very amiss if that civil servant thinks across the whole of government is spending only 1.3 billion of taxpayers money on consultants. I would wager that she has misled the committee by a very significant amount.

Why is it whenever I see one of these committee meetings, the people being asked questions never seem to have a clue what they’re doing or have any basic figures which they should surely have. Wreaks of incompetence.

I wouldn't give her a job managing toilet paper. She has no idea how much of our tax money they are wasting and where it is going.

Chocolate bloomin teapots. These treasury people are just grifters. No accountability. Can’t even give a straight figure from 2 years ago accounts. Civil service is crammed with waste. 😵‍💫

Unbelievable answers from this woman. At the very least she would have YTD figures for 2025/26 and see whether they're anywhere near halving the 'Estimated 1.3bn' which should be an ACTUAL by 2024 when Final Accounts were produced. She can't be serious giving those responses.

This is just a classical response from a government employee who doesn't really care how our money is spaffed up the wall. Well done on holding them to account. 👏

Like you said, Rupert "putting more wheels on their Bentleys" as they have no clue and think they have an open checkbook.

Grrrrrrrrr a Gratuitous Waste of Our Tax money Cant do their Jobs themselves Goes back Decades Cant do your job?? Trained properly??? CV accurate Skills and Experiance and Proof??? No Job or Sacked

Keep at them. If I was as shit at my job as they are I would have been sacked a long time ago

They don't know. They clearly need some more consultants to work out the answer on how much they spend on consultants.

The public sector lacks the motivations of the "carrot & stick", as does (Western) society.