Zia Yusuf does not know what he's doing

Earlier this month we saw the dramatic departure of Zia Yusuf from Reform. Shortly after, he changed his mind, choosing instead fo focus on his pet project, DOGE.

DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is an attempt to gimmick the work of Elon Musk in bringing down wasteful spending. Superficially, this sounds promising, but as with everything else Reform does, it’s profoundly unserious. It’s is going to be a huge flop. Auditing only works if the auditor has a working knowledge of the thing they are auditing. In the DOGE case, they don't.

Zia Yusuf doesn't know anything about the public sector. He knows nothing of the culture, and knows nothing about bureaucracies. Running a large bureaucracy is not like running a service industry business. It's an entirely different culture. Yusuf is going in with the presumption that all public sector workers are lazy, woke and cosseted, and that the waste is rife and obvious. It's old school Tory mythology.
It’s all predicated on the arrogant assumption that nobody in local government knows what they’re doing and everyone has their hands in the till.

The intent of DOGE is to steam in and reveal mountains of waste, inefficiency and corruption in a matter of weeks. If that were the reality, this would be a sound strategy for Reform in that they could really set the agenda. What we’ll actually get, though, is lurid but essentially weak headlines about “Woke waste”. Classic Taxpayer’s Alliance garbage. It makes for good Daily Mail clickbait slopaganda, but it doesn’t deliver extensive efficiency or huge savings. A lot of it plays on public ignorance as to what constitutes a lot of money in terms of government spending (or indeed any large organisation).

My own experience insulates me from falling for a lot of this crap. As an IT worker, I’ve done a few contracting stints in local authorities and large government organisations. I did a short spell working for Atkins Global, working on the facilities management system for the Metropolitan police. I later worked on a similar system for Leeds hospitals. These are systems in which could could find lightbulb changes billed at hundred of pounds. But it’s more complicated than that.

The facilities systems I worked with meant that any nurse or office worker could call a central office to report a facilities problem, which would then go into a bidding system underpinned by Service Level Agreements. A contractor would be there within a couple of hours. You’re not just being billed for the lightbulb and labour. You’re being billed for availability and the whole system cost of facilities management. We have this because the knock-on costs of a malfunctioning lightbulb in an operating theatre are huge in terms of cancellations and waiting list delays in which conditions can worsen. It needs to be addressed immediately.

As such, contractor costs can look far higher on paper. Sure a lightbulb may cost little over £3 and take only five minutes to change in the home, but large organisations work on completely different dynamics. As to local councils, they have vast estates from offices to warehouses. Even at its most efficient, running a large bureaucracy is never going to be cheap.

If you listened to Reformers, though, you’d be convinced that public sector offices were swimming in cash with lavish facilities. That may be true of London MoD offices (I don’t know), but most public sector offices I’ve been in, from highways through to MoD nuclear bunkers are shabby and dated, with no frills, zero surplus operating budget, and are only held together by the goodwill of the people who work in them.

When it comes to councils, they've seen arrogant and ambitious auditors come and go, making huge assumptions about efficiency improvements, only to find the only way to make savings in frontline departments is to yet again reduce headcount because there's nothing else to cut. Some departments defy any attempt to bring efficiency, not least social services because sick and vulnerable people aren't service customers. It cannot work like a car insurance call centre. There can be productivity problems but these often exist for diverse and complex reasons, not least morale and poor leadership. The answers are not found by scanning spreadsheets.

You might find one or two heel draggers and those persistently off sick, largely protected by unions, but most do have a work ethic of some kind. Harassing them with productivity assessments just means lumbering them with more paperwork, and they know full well how to game whatever system you install to minimise interference.

The waste in local government is not always obvious. Councils do spend vast sums, some of which looks like waste, some of which looks like they're overpaying for services, but the bottom line is that large estates are expensive to run and people are expensive to hire, and there's no one size fits all model because no two councils are exactly alike.

IT spending is also difficult to assess in that software is inherently expensive as are consultants, but most large organisations these days are data driven. It's unavoidable - especially when the public sector has almost as many data security considerations as banks.

Cursory inspections can uncover clickbait headline fodder, such as welfare spending on asylum seekers (trampolining sessions for migrants), but it doesn't add up to even 1% of spending - and much of it is to meet statutory/regulatory obligations and their general duty of care. DOGE will attempt to generate headlines this way to justify its existence and keep the base happy, but you have to do a deep organisational analysis to truly understand what's going wrong and why.

One such example of regulatory obligation was sent to me by a council official this morning. The Burial (Management) (Scotland) Regulations 2025 creates:

- requirement for a formal management plan to be produced every 12 months

- requirement for written records of training

- requirements for regular inspections of headstones including public notifications of any inspections, cleaning and works.

None of this is necessarily wrong, it is just more administration required to undertake the same basic task and a potential area of negligence created if they are not undertaken. Every aspect of state function has these types of updates with increasing regularity. Every department will have its own regulatory costs. DOGE can make recommendations for deregulation to central government, but it cannot instruct councils to ignore the law, and regardless, most regulations exist for a reason.

Zia Yusuf thinks there is low hanging fruit, and to be fair, there might be. They might be able to sack a few tree counters and diversity bods, but that approach soon runs out of road. This is when you need to look at how councils manage service procurement and day to day spending.

Even that is not so easy. An expensive outlay may be unplanned statutory spending, or unavoidable crisis response. Some reactive spending is inherently difficult to track and the fact is, whether people like it or not, waste is an unavoidable fact of life in any large organisation. There's also a surge in inflationary costs. There are ways to analyse the data, assuming you have all of it, but not everything is funnelled through central accounts and some units manage their own budgets accordingly.

Ultimately, there's a reason we pay large sums to large accountancy firms to audit government. They have an institutional understanding of local government. It's what we pay them for. They know what they are at looking at, and they know what they are looking for. The wins are to be found by looking closely at their working, understanding where their institutional blind spots are. Inherently, they won't see a problem with diversity and green crap spending because they themselves have to meet the same statutory obligations. But any notion of steaming in and immediately finding waste signposted in neon lights is for the birds.

My feeling is that the waste and excessive spending comes from structural problems in the way that services are procured, particularly where services are outsourced to multiple private contractors. Systems, like the ones I’ve worked on, that were originally implemented in the name of streamlining and market efficiency - born of the Tory idea that public sector bad, private sector good. Much of the spending then will be legacy costs - pensions and debts etc.

Probably one of the biggest outlays for any local authority is adult care which I believe is wildly out of control but requires a complete system overhaul, looking closely at NHS workflow.

The point for me, is that it requires new thinking that can look at the overall system architecture and identify bottlenecks. Often this is beyond the remit of councils who are often the last in the chain, working reactively, responding to the inefficiency of other organisations - particularly hospitals. This is beyond the talents of DOGE's Taxpayer's Alliance Gotcha-style snooping.

Recently, I've been looking at NHS policy, in which I've found the problem is often unnecessary admissions, unplanned workloads, and problems with discharges when there is no capacity in the care system. Some hospitals are better than others, but some have extremely poor data management where staff cannot locate patients at any given time and are still passing patient details between each other on paper.

Were this fully digitised with electronic patient wristbands, the system could manage workflows better, and when discharge is imminent, care providers could bid electronically to arrange seamless patient transfers, thereby freeing up beds and ending the problem of bed blocking. The NHS could learn a lot from food supply chain management.

Effective structural changes are where the big wins will come from, but that will also require investment in computer systems, but that brings its own problems given the track record of large government IT procurement. This can lead to an ongoing cycle of botched reforms. The lesson we keep learning is that running a bureaucracy is not cheap, waste is unavoidable and bureaucracies are inherently inefficient.

To then have fly-by-nights like Zia Yusuf claiming they have the skills, knowledge and talent to do what has defeated generations of well meaning council CEOs, marks them out as naive and extraordinarily arrogant. DOGE will stick its nose in, generate a few bogus headlines (reinforcing their own mythology) but will ultimately accomplish very little and nothing lasting.

If it really is the case that we have to eliminate spending, then we just have to cut overall budgets and let councils sort it out themselves. This often leads to cuts in frontline services, while institutional costs and estate costs remain stubbornly high. You can bring down estates costs by encouraging working from home but DOGE is ideologically opposed to this because they have a shop floor mentality and assume all council workers are lazy. Even then, though, back offices do not account for the lion's share of estates costs.

This leaves me to conclude that what we actually need is effective, experienced and dedicated councillors who can drive change. For this we would need some reform of local democracy, giving councillors more power of investigation, and more powers to hire and fire. We then need much higher calibre of councillors. That's the key - but that's the one thing you won't get from voting Reform. Many of Reform's councillors were paper candidates, some of whom aren't even turning up. There is no training or leadership from the party, with no strategic direction, and nothing even approaching policy. Instead we get headline grabbing gimmicks like DOGE, operating on deeply flawed and arrogant assumptions. That's who they are.