John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.
It is no secret that the British are bad at long-term projects.
Announcements of new infrastructure are met with a weary sigh and the expectation that they will arrive decades late and billions over budget. We are world leaders in this – with HS2 expected to become the most expensive railway per kilometre in the world. Such is the problem that it has spawned a cottage industry of reports, columns and think tanks lambasting how bad we are at building this. But we should also consider how these lessons apply to other, less tangible bits of our state.
The layman’s understanding of HS2 has coalesced around a few key points. Planning and legal challenges have driven up the costs of the pre-building process. The government lacks nous when negotiating with the private sector to build it. Political uncertainty about how and where the project will evolve leads contractors to front-load their estimates. Every step leads to bloat, culminating in £100 million bat tunnels, blown budgets and political disillusionment.
Such mega projects are far from the only place this happens. Military procurement has become a byword for fiscal disasters. The Ajax fighting vehicle cost more than £6bn and came into service six years later than planned, only to be paused a month later after making soldiers sick. Across the RAF and Navy, other upgrades and replacements have been delayed, overpriced, and swayed between cancellation and renewal. It is hard not to wonder where else it is going on.
Yet the real interest in these failures lies not in the individual scandals themselves, but in what they reveal about how the modern British state understands efficiency. We have become adept at pointing to visible waste — delayed trains, defective vehicles, ballooning contracts — but less comfortable examining the quieter forces that shape those outcomes: the legal protections we insist upon, the political risks we seek to avoid, and the institutional habits that reward caution over clarity. In other words, our argument about waste has become simpler than the state we are trying to govern.
Every government comes to power promising to eradicate waste within the public sector, and leaves power having largely failed to do so. Productivity in our state services has flatlined. Raising rates of dependency and demands on health and social care have driven up costs. The state is expanding without meeting the required performance standards. The result is the worst form of stagnation, with taxes rising and output remaining well below expectations.
This paradox was a major driver of our defeat in 2024 and lies behind much of Labour’s slump in the polls since then.
It is a failure stemming from a flawed conception of government waste. Overspending is rarely the result of pure frivolity. Yes, at the margins, there is stuff that can easily be done away with – but most of it is inconsequential rounding errors in a state that spends more than £1 trillion a year. Instead, as with our overspending on HS2 and military equipment, most of the waste stems from structural issues that are often tied to political demands.
Across the public sector, systems are not optimised for speed, flexibility and cost. They are constrained by risk aversion and centralised control. The same ministers who complain that they cannot get things done insulate themselves from making decisive calls. Just as HS2 was enlarged by mitigation measures to prevent the railway from being seen by (largely Tory) voters along the route, so too do public services accumulate layers of process, oversight, and precaution intended to minimise controversy and diffuse responsibility. Each additional safeguard reduces the risk of scandal or legal challenge but also increases the baseline cost of delivery and slows the system’s capacity to adapt. What emerges is a state designed less to achieve outcomes than to avoid blame — cautious, procedurally dense, and structurally expensive.
Governments fail to tackle this because the remedies are politically dangerous. Faster delivery entails fewer rights of consultation; greater flexibility requires greater tolerance for visible failure and uneven outcomes. Each of these is an uncomfortable trade-off for the voters. It also takes care and management to achieve. The extremes of stripping away regulations and rights still come at a cost. Certainly, we would love to build infrastructure as quickly as the Chinese do, but few would welcome the conditions under which they do so.
A bolder and more effective approach would need to look at these systemic issues. We need to review just what slows us down and drives up cost, rather than relying on slogans. It also likely means upfront spending that generates savings later. It means being honest about which protections and processes justify their cost, and which are just there to provide cover for politicians.
It also implies a willingness to accept upfront disruption and transitional costs in pursuit of longer-term gains, whether by simplifying approval regimes, devolving operational control, or tolerating greater variance in outcomes. None of these offers quick wins or painless savings. But without a clearer political settlement on what the state is for, and what trade-offs citizens are prepared to accept, the cycle of disappointment, stagnation and performative change will continue.
HS2 was never intended to be the most expensive railway system in the world. Political choices and the processes the government built made it so. The same mistakes are likely repeated across the state, with inefficiencies resulting from well-intentioned but poorly designed systems. Getting this fixed is not flashy, but slow, involved and detail oriented. It is perhaps the only choice we have.
Britain’s fiscal predicament will be familiar to anyone who reads these pages. We have rising demand for public services, and limited growth to pay for it. With an ageing population, doing less can only take us so far. If the state is to continue meeting public expectations, it will have to become more effective at turning spending into outcomes. That will not be achieved through another round of rhetorical crackdowns on waste, but by confronting the political and institutional choices that make delivery slow, costly and risk-averse. Efficiency, in other words, is no longer a managerial aspiration but a governing necessity.