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The Treasury is to ask UK government departments to better co-operate to cut waste in areas ranging from NHS treatment to buildings maintenance.
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray, will launch a series of reviews of government spending designed to find efficiencies by improving the way money flows across Whitehall departments.
External experts will be brought in to help Murray assess where government initiatives can be further added with a view to reallocating funds in next year’s spending review.
The NHS’s efforts to move health care out of hospitals is one of four areas chosen for review, along with homelessness, youth services and infrastructure management. Officials said these areas have the greatest potential for finding better ways to spend public money.
“These reviews will scrutinize government programs to ensure they improve people’s lives while eliminating wasteful spending from the public sector,” Murray said.
“We have a duty to taxpayers to make sure every pound of their money works as hard in government as the people earning it.”
The government’s 10-year plan for the NHS, published last year, promised to shift more care from hospitals to local clinics, a long-standing health service goal that has met with only partial success. Murray will aim to find ways to better link local services such as mental health and social care to provide patients with alternatives to hospitals, which currently absorb the majority of NHS England’s £196bn budget.
In a homelessness strategy published before Christmas, ministers criticized how £3.7 billion a year was spent on homelessness in England. The strategy describes a “cycle of crisis”, in which the cost of temporary accommodation has doubled in two years, while services to keep people in their homes have been cut.
More than 380,000 people are estimated to be homeless in England, the majority of whom are in temporary accommodation, which can cost councils up to £30,000 per year per household. More than 4,600 people were sleeping rough on the most recent night surveyed by the government in 2024.
Ligia Teixeira, chief executive of the Center for Homelessness Impact, welcomed the review, arguing that “a value for money approach that looks at the whole system could help shift investment upwards”.
He said: “The evidence is clear that the current system leads to delayed, crisis response, particularly spending toward temporary housing, which is expensive and produces poor outcomes over time. The answer is not to weaken protections or reduce access to temporary housing, but to redesign the system so that fewer people need it.”
Murray will look at how the NHS, the police and other public services including Jobcentres can do more to prevent people becoming homeless.
The Treasury believes that the £1 billion spent per year on provision for young people, including youth and sports clubs, is divided across a number of departments. It wants the department to make more long-term decisions on the maintenance of roads, public buildings and other infrastructure.
While ministers and officials have long complained about Whitehall budget silos, Treasury officials have the power to move money between departments to the places where it can be spent most effectively.
Murray is to lead a review of government spending next year, which will set departmental budgets for 2028–2029 and 2029–2030. If it succeeds in finding efficiencies, the same intergovernmental approach would be adopted with other areas of public expenditure.
