I’ve lifted this excellent piece from Eve Robertson Armstrong on Facebook who lifted it from Josh Hunt on twitter (X). I’m guessing a Josh Hunt wrote it but can’t trace him.
The British Government has wasted more money on failed projects than some countries spend building their entire infrastructure.
After hearing about the cancellation of the Stonehenge Tunnel project, yet it still racking up £179 million in cost, I wanted to look at other projects and costs to see what the picture looks like this century.
Every number here comes from official reports, the National Audit Office, parliamentary committees, and ministers’ own admissions.
Let me show you where your money has gone.
HS2 was sold to the country as a £37.5 billion high speed rail network connecting London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. The first phase was supposed to open this year. In 2026.
Here’s where it actually is.
After six years of construction and £46 billion spent, tunnels have been bored, earth has been moved, viaducts have been built. But there is no railway. Not a single metre of track. The legs to Manchester and Leeds have been cancelled entirely. What’s left is a line from London to Birmingham with no confirmed opening date, no confirmed final cost, and estimates so unstable that Parliament’s own Public Accounts Committee has warned the cash cost of Phase 1 alone could reach £80 billion. Some industry forecasts put it above £100 billion.
The Transport Secretary stood in Parliament last year and called it “an appalling mess.” She said billions had been wasted on scope changes, ineffective contracts, and bad management. Fraud allegations have since emerged in the supply chain.
Three times the original price. A fraction of what was promised. And still years from completion.
But HS2 is just one example.
The NHS National Programme for IT was supposed to create a unified electronic health record for every patient in England. Launched in 2002 with a budget of £6 billion. Abandoned in 2011 with the Public Accounts Committee putting the expected cost at £12.4 billion. It delivered a fraction of its promised benefits. Only 13 out of 169 hospital trusts received the systems they were meant to get. Then one of the contractors sued the government and won a settlement of nearly half a billion pounds. On top.
During Covid, the government threw billions out the door with almost no checks. The Covid Counter Fraud Commissioner’s final report, published December 2025, found that fraud and error across pandemic support schemes cost taxpayers £10.9 billion. How much has been recovered? £1.8 billion. The Commissioner’s words, not mine. The previous government “left the front door open to fraud.” Bounce Back Loans were rolled out in under two weeks with no independent verification. PPE contracts were handed to companies with no track record. Defective gowns, masks, and visors weren’t inspected for two years. By the time anyone checked, the money was gone.
Universal Credit was supposed to simplify the benefits system. The original programme was budgeted at around £2 billion. The National Audit Office has flagged massive overruns repeatedly as the project ballooned in scope and complexity. Total costs have run many times higher than planned. Nobody was fired.
The smart meter rollout was supposed to be finished by 2020. It wasn’t. Costs have hit £13.5 billion. The programme has been dogged by meters losing functionality, missed deadlines, and a failure to deliver the energy savings that justified the whole thing in the first place.
One many of you will be familiar with. The Post Office spent £600 million on a computer system called Horizon. It was fundamentally flawed. Its defects led to more than 900 wrongful convictions. Sub-postmasters lost their homes. Their businesses. Their families. At least 13 people took their own lives. Compensation has now reached £1.4 billion and is expected to hit £2 billion. Fujitsu, the company that built the system, has not paid a single penny toward that bill. It is still collecting government contracts.
The Fire Control project. £469 million. Seven years. An attempt to modernise fire service control rooms. Scrapped. Nothing delivered. What a waste.
The electronic tagging programme. Five years late. Tens of millions spent. Abandoned. They ended up buying off the shelf tags that could have been bought for a fraction of the price years earlier.
The Garden Bridge. £53 million of public money. Not a single piece was built. You might ask what £53 million was spent on exactly.
The Rwanda deportation scheme. £715 million. Four people went voluntarily. Not a single forced deportation was carried out. Then the whole thing was scrapped.
Now here’s the part that ties it all together.
In 2019, the Prime Minister’s own Implementation Unit looked at the government’s £432 billion portfolio of major projects. Only 8% had proper plans to evaluate whether they were working. 64% of that spending, £276 billion, had no evaluation at all. None. The government was spending hundreds of billions of your money with no way of knowing if any of it was delivering.
The National Audit Office has said there has been a “consistent pattern of underperformance” spanning 25 years. Twenty five years of reports saying the same thing. And nothing changes.
Add it up. HS2 overruns. NHS IT written off. £10.9 billion in Covid fraud. Universal Credit ballooning. Smart meters over budget. Post Office compensation approaching £2 billion. Fire Control. Rwanda. Garden Bridge. Tagging. And those are just the ones that made the news. The total runs into the tens of billions. More than the entire annual education budget. Approaching what the government now spends on debt interest in a single year.
And here’s the scary part. This is only what we know about. The NAO has been clear the real picture is worse because most projects aren’t properly evaluated in the first place. These are the failures too big to hide. Imagine the ones that aren’t.
This is the same government that says there’s no money for public services. That raises your taxes every year and delivers less every year. That can’t build a railway. Can’t roll out a computer system. Can’t buy protective equipment without losing billions to fraud.
And every time it happens, the pattern is the same. The project fails. The minister moves on. The civil servant gets a knighthood. The contractor gets the next contract. And you pick up the bill.
The UK doesn’t have a funding problem. It has a competence problem. And until that changes, no amount of tax rises, borrowing, or spending reviews will make the slightest difference”.
So the next time any unionist has the temerity to mention the word ferry you know what to do…
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Talking-up Scotland 
Corruption, endemic and systemic.
We always had bent policemen, bent property developers, bent cooncillors (with funny handshakes). But our modern spiv culture wears designer suits and spectacles and sniffs coke in their Commons office.
Another morbid symptom of the decline and fall. Hope it accelerates on May 7th.
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Yes, good article. Include £37 Billion PPE, Hinkley point, bailing out the private water companies, to be honest I think we are just scratching the surface, also the UK treasury has passed an audit in 30 yrs, remember the when audit Scotland has annual go at the SG.
Stuart McNicoll.
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should read ‘ has not passed an audit ‘.
Stuart McNicoll
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You know time and time again various people, outwith the media, have highlighted the various failures and catastrophes linked to recent UK governments.
Which includes the vast overspend on the budgets of various UK government projects and also huge delays on their completion date.
Then of course all UK taxpayers pay for these projects , yet not all UK taxpayers benefit from some of these various UK government projects.
I would often see online different people use what they said was a prime example of SNP incompetence, that is the Ferries, who then received examples, by other people online, of incompetence linked to various projects controlled by different UK governments,
These were clearly examples where there had been a waste of UK tax payers money, in that the UK government had failed to complete these different government projects both on budget and on time.
That was then met with the pathetic response of “Whataboutery”.
So basically they, the anti SNP mob, wanted to block out failures linked to the UK governments and so they only wanted to focus upon, what they said , was the failure of the Scottish government, or rather the same one, that via the media, keeps resurfacing , as in the Ferries.
Now whether you do or do not think that there is an ongoing problem with Ferries in Scotland, that then does not mean that all of the serious issues with the over spending and delays linked to UK government projects , that as serious issues, should then be disregarded and so be seen as non issues and insignificant compared to Ferries in Scotland.
These UK failures are impacting people within various parts of the UK or indeed sometimes they are impacting the whole UK .
I’m thinking that Ferries would not be such a unique example that was exploited by so many pro UK politicians, if it were not for the pro UK media over promoting them as a major issue.
Also if that same pro UK media would then give an equal amount of both airtime on TV/Radio and also extensive coverage on the front pages of their newspapers to the shockingly growing list of UK government projects , that as projects, are vastly over budget and vastly delayed and so then surely they are prime examples of UK government(s) failures and incompetence.
However failures and incompetence derived from UK governments are never revisited time and time again or indeed given the same exposure and negative attention by the UK media , as then that would make it far too easy for the SNP to then neutralise all of the flak that they get about Ferries from various pro UK sources.
Talking of exposure what the Hell is happening with Michelle Mone ?
Has it just all gone away as a scandal and so then no one is supposed to care any more, also the various Tories involved in the PPE scandal just all get off Scot free (or rather if it is a Scot, more so an SNP one, then ‘getting off’ with something or being ‘free’ is apparently never an option available to them).
Watch ITV’s “Covid Contracts: Follow the money” on YouTube and then think why all of that, as a huge political scandal, is now seemingly just being filed under past UK history by the rest of the UK media, seemingly not to be revisited.
However you do then wonder what Labour, as the new UK government, are doing now to investigate that as a Tory UK government scandal and so then hold (all of) those (Tories involved) responsible and so to account.
(I suspect that for some Tories in a former Boris Johnson led UK government , are more than fully aware and so then painfully aware that Ms Mone knows too many facts and also more importantly too many names (Tory ones), to then ever be held to account- BTW the National Crime Agency investigation into PPE Medpro, linked to Baroness Michelle Mone, officially opened in May 2021 and it now almost May 2026).
What can I say, other than she , Mone, still holds the title of Baroness, which basically is then a quintessential example one could associate with the UK State , which as a quintessential example, clearly exposes the UK State for what it really is, a corrupt and dysfunctional State not worth Scotland remaining a part of it in the future (as they will only drag us ,the people of Scotland, down with them-that is down with their UK – in the eyes of the world).
Liz S
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Would it be too much to ask Mairi Mcallan to bring this up on Question Time when she has to defend the issues over the ferries? Add how an independent Scotland would change the Energy policy from a market driven for profit to one based on cost. This would reduce costs for personal but especially businesses uses.
How the 10000 GB Energy jobs in Aberdeen have been missed yet we still pay a gross salary to the quango leader yet it has no mandate of what it is supposed to do which matches the article above.
To actively give the truth about the Scottish NHS and the extra finance at risk if the Union Party regains power as well as the £2 million the Labour cabinet has taken from Private Heath Care as bribes, sorry they call those donations now. Their NHS secretary openly says they need to privatise the English NHS, well what’s left of it.
Welfare will be reduced so we match England’s Victorian levels of poverty.
Much has been made about the polls but the only one which counts is on 7 May. The so-called parties for Independence need to energise their voters and those on the fence with challenging the narrative of the Union. Swinney is no longer managing a Government and trying to be the calm, trustworthy voice of reason. He is in an Election battle which needs won decisively to ensure we have Independence so he needs to take on this bare knuckle fight to the death.
The SNP have been at my door and the gentleman did take on board my point that they were not elected as managers but guerillas to bring down the union. So many open goals and no attempts made to kick the ball. No literature I’ve received from the SNP has mentioned the word Independence. All other parties are about the SNP’s failures. Maybe there is time for another SNP one to mention Independence and the many failures of the other parties and how Independence will give an opportunity to fix those issues plaguing us.
We have had the openly corrupt Westminster never challenged. Privatised Water Companies and over a million unreported (they were honorable and would) raw sewage dumps causing deaths and illnesses. The Ajax fiasco. The many enquiries into failing health care in England especially around Women’s Health and Maternity Care.
Reform will dissolve the Scottish Parliament. Labour will sell Scottish NHS and Scottish Water as all the English silver has been sold probably to appease a warmonger.
It’s time to attack the liars and give a vision of an Independent Scotland. To get a Super Majority of seats and VOTES, fight as if this is the last election as it possibly could be.
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Very well said and also very well written G Caldow.
Unfortunately tonight Ms McAllan has 5 pro UK panellists to contend with (that includes the host) on this episode of BBC QT in Aberdeen.
Just as the Scottish Green party panellist also has this same problem tonight , which in fact all pro Independence panellists always have to contend with as an constant situation on every single panel of this (corrupt) programme , whenever they, BBC QT , are ever in Scotland.
(There were even times when we had to contend with Tim Stanley on the panel when BBC QT did an episode in Scotland).
Plus will Sarwar allow her, Ms McAllan, or indeed the Scottish Green politician to get a word in edgeways, as he does have a habit of talking over other people in order to try to stop others hearing what that person is saying, especially if it is the truth, and also to try to distract them from the point that they were trying to make.
I will not be watching it but may get intel second hand tomorrow online via others……..also to see what the mood , or rather the dominant politics, of most of the audience will be, that will be interesting and also perhaps predictable (or even tomorrow perhaps reading that some people online spotted some obvious or known plants in the audience as well).
BBC QT , that’s where honest political debate dies and BritNat propaganda takes over. (same goes for BBC Debate Night, BBC Scotcast and also BBC Newscast).
Liz S
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Absolutely…I have been messaging J Swinney and general SNP at Bluesky to PLEASE start shouting about the ten years of Labour control at Holyrood and their disastrous legacy and it’s a long list but things like senidng £billions back to WM, trams fiasco, PFI scheme (scam) plunging Scotland into £billions of debt to this day etc. SNP needs to go on the attack and point out how the English government are taking a wrecking ball to Scotland’s industry etc…
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Seems as if the UKEnglish government is somewhat corrupt. More like a mafia than a government…surprised the people of England are so accepting of being ripped off, and Scotland, though folks probably don’t realise how bad things are at GOVUK in England because the SNP is mitigating so much of the EngGov’s damage.
This needs to be seen by everyone who has a vote in May.
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