Value for Money Tsar to Get Equivalent of £250k Salary
Labour’s newly appointed ‘Value for Money’ tsar will be paid the equivalent of a £247,000 annual salary, despite a track record of overseeing projects beset by delays and spiralling costs. The Telegraph has the story.
David Goldstone, announced in the Budget as Chairman of the Office for Value for Money, will be paid £950 a day for an average commitment of one day a week, the Treasury said on Thursday.
The compensation amounts to £49,400 over the course of a year – equivalent to a full-time salary of £247,000 and significantly more than Sir Keir Starmer’s £166,786 salary.
He has been appointed to the role on a 12-month basis.
Mr. Goldstone previously oversaw delivery of the London Olympics, where costs spiralled to £9.35 billion.
That was almost four times the initial £2.45 billion estimate, based on figures cited by the Labour Government in the run-up to the 2012 Games.
Following the Olympics Mr. Goldstone moved on to run the London Legacy Development Corporation, where projects including the London Stadium and East Bank cultural district have also reported cost overruns.
He was also Chief Operating Officer at the Ministry of Defence between 2017 and 2020. The Commons public accounts committee said the following year that the MoD had been guilty of “repeatedly wasting taxpayers’ money”, while a Labour report identified £4 billion of waste.
More recently, he was criticised by the Public Accounts Committee after taking a £168,000 bonus on top of a £311,000 salary for overseeing non-existent renovation work on the Palace of Westminster.
Worth reading in full.
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What interests me about this is the existence of a special department that concerns itself with value for money
Surely the relevant ministers and senior civil servants in the various departments that actually deliver services should be carefully monitoring value for money as a key part of their job- is that not what leaders and managers do???!
There cannot be a more obvious way for a ‘relevant minister’ to broadcast their complete unsuitability for the job than to be overseen by a “Value for money Tsar.” And with a track record such as David Goldstone owns coming as he does from HS2 oversights team the guarantee of obscene wastes of money is baked in.
Actually this is just another way of winding us up.
”Actually this is just another way of winding us up.”
Yup – I can’t imagine they give two hoots about value for money
Exactly – as soon as you feel the need to create a specific department for ‘efficiency’ or ‘value for money’ or ‘culture’, it confirms you don’t have it within the actual teams already there…
When I was a Civil Servant there was a strict Cost/Benefit analysis carried out before any major scheme was approved.
This new Quango is just another “back covering” unit for the Government which wants to hose £billions on lunatic/dubious schemes and deflect blame when the money is squandered ….. as it will be.
Thanks for the information- and what you say makes perfect sense
GB News had on somebody yesterday who agreed that cost/benefit analyses were carried out but then preening ministers, already polishing their ribbon cutting scissors, decreed that they go ahead regardless.
*Off-topic alert* Peter Lynch hung himself, apparently🙁;
https://www.gbnews.com/news/yorkshire-grandad-peter-lynch-jailed-summer-riots-hung-hanged-himself-inquest
Nope, I am not buying it.
We are being lied to. So what really happened is that he was hung by some other prisoners as I have suspected.
Yes it’s hard to believe anything coming from official channels anymore. We’ve been lied to left, right and centre, across all contexts for so long now. Surely close family who visited him would have detected if something was up with his demeanor or mental health or was he being threatened or intimidated. I just don’t know…Being stuck in jail on a bogus charge, especially for a 2.5 year stretch, is going to affect people differently, I guess.
As I have posted previously we are being expected to believe that a 61 year old man, somehow managed to take his own life in an overcrowded prison with a piece of rope which he just happened to have stashed down his trouser leg at the time of his incarceration. And nobody saw him for what…twenty minutes?
Oh F off and try a new one and don’t insult my intelligence.
In the 1970 play the “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” set in the Milan, Italy, police headquarters the police claim that a sudden anxiety attack (or “raptus”) drove the anarchist to suicide. [“Raptus”: a sudden psychotic episode that leads someone to commit suicide.] Do click the above link and read the detailed account of the play’s plot. The following is only a part of it: “A few weeks earlier, an anarchist suspect, who was illegally detained under suspicion of carrying out a major bombing attack, conveniently fell out of the interrogation room window to his death. After getting himself arrested, the Maniac—a mysterious but dangerously unstable man with a talent for impersonations—manages to convince the police that he is actually the judge overseeing the investigation into the anarchist’s death. He forces the officers to reenact the anarchist’s interrogation, exposes the countless lies and inconsistencies in their story, and reveals their close links to the far-right militants who really carried out the bombing. The whole time, he mercilessly mocks the policemen’s corruption—although they are often too dim-witted to notice—and secretly tape-records all the evidence of their guilt. At the end of the play, he presents the audience with a fateful dilemma… Read more »
Perhaps the FSU could muster a cast of professional actors from its membership and stage a fund-raising performance of this famous play for the benefit of Peter Lynch’s family or others who have been wrongfully incarcerated by our bent justice and judicial system.
I think your scepticism is justified, but it wouldn’t surprise me if our government was also involved.
Our government, Kneel and his judiciary in particular are involved firstly by ensuring this brave Patriot was sent to prison. Secondly because they ensured he was incarcerated alongside British hating foreigners.
The prison governor must take the rap for this – clearly incompetent or a coward.
It’s a warning to patriots to shut and up let our people be replaced – or else. And it’s a sign of how important The Great Replacement is to the globalists and the Anti-White Party. It’s now their central objective, their most important project.
The text itself is full of lies. Lynch was not jailed for rioting but for peacefully attending a public protest which occurred in parallell with other people rioting, for calling police officers scum and shouting “Child killers!” in front of a ‘refugee’ establishment. Tellingly, he pleaded guilty to civil unrest, ie, to marching in the street and shouting stuff.
Oh I do hope a lot of that will be going into his pension so that we can get most of it back when he carks it.
Ordinarily with these so-called jobs pension payments will be made in addition to salary.
I would be amazed if within twelve months we are not being told of his £200k bonus for… oh I don’t know, turning up three days a week.
250k for an average of one day a week! Now that’s what I call Good value.
Guys this lot are seriously taking the P and laughing at us, what next I wonder? Sexual harassment Panda? Haircut Tzar?, Healthy eating Hippo?
The contempt with which they view us, makes Joe Bidens comment of 100 million American being Garbage quite a mild comment in comparison with the way Labour regards us the people.
Hear, hear.
Speaking of ‘value for money’ the NHS “HSJ” blog/newsletter is raving about ‘budgets for tomorrow being raided for today”. The money put is greedy and wants its promised assumed rations. The link is here but as I’m registered I’ll save you the pain and post the full text below. “Finance and efficiency Fresh £900m raid on capital revealed in Budget small print By Henry Anderson31 October 2024 Treasury reveals two “capital surrenders” for tech and pay Follows criticism of practice from senior NHS figures and government DHSC said a similar exercise last year was “targeted, limited and non-recurrent” Close to £1bn has been raided from health capital funding this year to meet day-to-day pressures in tech and pay, documents published alongside the Budget reveal. A Treasury paper reveals two “surrenders” of capital funding in the current financial year, which were previously undisclosed. The move, finalised since the general election, comes despite Wes Streeting’s criticism of successive capital-to-revenue transfers in previous years. The trend was also condemned in Lord Darzi’s review last month for the new government. The transfers are meant to partly address the £22bn gap in public finances that has been claimed by chancellor Rachel Reeves. The document said… Read more »
Continued…
If the NHS is going to achieve the Chancellor’s 2% productivity target it is essential that capital pots are protected so that health leaders and their teams can make the long-term investments needed to boost productivity.”
HSJ asked the DHSC and the Treasury whether there would be any further transfers this year.
A DHSC spokesperson said: “We are determined to break out of this cycle where capital budgets for tomorrow are raided every year to pay for the cost of failure today.
“The billions announced by the Chancellor yesterday for tech and capital will be a turning point for the NHS, allowing it to arrest the decline, fix the foundations, and deliver change.”
The greedy @#&##
Apologies, I said the link was above but comment size limits kicked in.
Here it is: https://www.hsj.co.uk/finance-and-efficiency/fresh-900m-raid-on-capital-revealed-in-budget-small-print/7038077.article
*money “put” above should read money “pit” but edits no longer possible. DS I posted it just a minute ago, can we have longer please?
Please don’t paste huge entire pieces like that again especially when only a click on a link away.
It didn’t hurt you and you’re more than welcome to skip past it. Anyway it’s not a click away. Are you registered with HSJ?
I appreciated the opportunity to read this without ads (or at all, for that matter).
I did not. It would have been a courtesy to summarise it – I have speed read it and frankly an no better informed for doing so.
And it is so long it breaks up the normal flow of quick-fire and useful comments on DS.
Thanks for posting – any sensible organisation with basic financial rules would not allow capital to be used for revenue items, unless it was to fund project work that could be capitalised overtime – building software platforms for example… I’m sure there is plenty of sleight of hand accounting going on here – ‘spend less’ seems to be a concept unknown to the NHS
How utterly hilarious.
Labour knowing neither the price nor value of anything appoints someone who knows neither to tell it on pay which is not either.
You couldn’t make it up.
That BTW was the reason given for the demise of the satirical political comedy puppet show “Spitting Image” [originally broadcast 1984-1996].
The antics of the people it depicted were more bizarre than the scriptwriters could compete with.
What a cug looking smunt ! Smirking all the way to the bank , on numerous occasions as well , nothing like a bit of failure to ensure your nose is well into the trough !
Excellent comments btw ! Peter Lynch & the others incarcerated by this corrupt so called Government after what we knew all along was a Terrorist Attack need to be exonerated .
So the Value for money Tsar isn’t value for money?
A bit like the BBC appointing a verification expert who lied on her CV. And talking of lying, GB News Patrick Christy raised the issue of Thieves lying about being an economist at the Bank of England as opposed to pushing the tea trolley round. Chopper Hope promised to ask her next time – could be worth watching.
Next they’ll be appointing a “Head of Better” – as in W1A, the BBC’s all to credible satire of itself and pointless bureaucracy in general.
Is a value-for-money Tsar something like a bargain imitation-monarch?
Nope. He is someone hired by 2TKeir and his Liebour government to claim always we are getting value for money from them.
The only people who have value for no money is 2TK and his cronies and their gazillions in freebies in 2TierGear.
Tsar (variation of Caesar) was the traditional title of the Russian emperors. Hence, I tought if a Labour government got a Tsar in some value-for-money deal, they were perhaps planning to replace the very expensive and thus, not very competitive homegrown product called Charles III. with something much cheaper manufactured abroad (probably by blind children without legs chained to workbench in perpetual darkness somewhere).
Is his job to see whether Free Gear & spouse’s wardrobe is value for money or whether they need a new billionaire outfitter.