Only £23bn over budget

Every year we spend £23bn on government project cock ups. That is £900 per household! This cost simply comes from the extra costs added to projects because the government runs over budget - it doesn't take in to account the fact the most of these projects are either completely pointless or should have been commissioned using public money in the first place. Of the 300 schemes that were analysed by The Tax Payers' Alliance, over half were running over budget. Here are some examples:

The NHS computer upgrade - estimated at £2.3bn, now looking more like £12.4bn!!

The Olympics - estimated at £2.4bn, now looking more like £9.3bn!

Sherwood Forest Hospitals project - estimated at £66m, now looking like £326m.

The Astute Class Submarines - estimated at £2.6bn , now looking like £3.6bn

Amazingly, the report says 14 major public sector projects racked up cost overruns bigger than the Millennium Dome, which went £204 million over budget. Andrew Allum, the chairman of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said "-Having had first-hand experience of public sector capital projects, it's clear that the politicians and civil servants in charge lack the management experience and subject knowledge to run them effectively-." PL's philosophy exactly. The government has the worst project planners and economists on planet earth, I am sure of that. It's not just the fact that these projects don't get delivered on time and more often than not are not quite what we hoped they'd be, but we are spending so much money - significant amounts - on this incompetence.