For fourteen years, successive Conservative governments promised disciplined spending, efficient public services and a laser-focus on value for money. What Britain received instead was an era marked by squandered billions, failed outsourcing experiments, collapsing contractors, and infrastructure schemes that spiralled far beyond their original budgets. From pandemic procurement scandals to defence projects stuck in perpetual delay, from disastrous privatisation ventures to the slow decay of critical public infrastructure, the Tory record has left the country with an eye-watering bill and little to show for it. This introduction sets the stage for examining how a political project built on austerity and “fiscal responsibility” ended up presiding over one of the most wasteful periods in modern British economic history. During that time the Conservatives bloated the national debt from £900 billion in 2010 to almost £3 trillion in 2024. Any government arriving after this point was always going to be pushing a boulder up a hill.

COSTLY CONTRACTS & PROGRAMMES (2010–2024)

Note: “Cost to taxpayer” includes write-offs, overruns, emergency bail-outs, fines, settlements, unplanned expenditure, and long-term liabilities, depending on the nature of each programme.

A. COVID-ERA CONTRACTS (PPE, Test & Trace & emergency procurement)

No.	Contract / Programme	Est. Cost / Loss / Liability	What Happened
1	PPE procurement write-offs	~£1.4bn written off or destroyed; wider unused stock much higher	Massive rush procurement; substandard masks, gowns, and visors; improper tendering; large quantities expired or unusable.
2	“VIP Lane” PPE contracts	≈ £4–5bn awarded to politically connected suppliers; some unusable	VIP “high-priority” channel ruled unlawful; major contracts delivered faulty goods or vastly overpriced PPE.
3	Test & Trace (Serco and others)	≈ £37bn over two years	NAO found costs excessively high; reliance on outsourcing produced poor results; ineffective contact-tracing metrics.
4	Randox testing contracts	>£770m	Awarded without competition; allegations of insufficient transparency; issues with quality controls and political proximity.
5	Ayanda / PPE Medpro-type supply deals	Hundreds of millions	Delivered unusable PPE; significant write-offs; legal disputes ongoing.
6	Lateral Flow Test procurement surge	Several billions	Huge stockpile left unused or expired as demand collapsed; poor forecasting.
7	Ventilator Challenge UK	Unknown full cost; >£500m estimated commitments	Many designs never used; expensive emergency contracts; little domestic strategic benefit.

---

B. HEALTH, IT & DIGITAL PUBLIC SERVICES

No.	Contract / Programme	Est. Cost / Loss	What Happened
8	NHS “Lorenzo” EPR/IT continuation	>£10bn programme (cumulative)	Longstanding digital health failure continued into 2010s; cost escalated dramatically and many trusts abandoned system.
9	NHS England outsourced backlogs/services (multiple providers)	>£2bn cumulative	High failure rates; repeated re-tendering; poor value in many regions.
10	NHS Supply Chain outsourcing restructure	£1–2bn+ lifetime costs	Outsourcing fragmentation increased logistics costs and complexity; NAO criticised performance.

---

C. DEFENCE & SECURITY PROCUREMENT

No.	Programme	Est. Cost / Loss	What Happened
11	Nimrod MRA4 cancellation	≈ £3.6–£4bn written off	Aircraft scrapped without entering service; decades-long plan wasted.
12	Ajax armoured vehicle programme	>£5.5bn allocated; still non-operational	Severe vibration issues; soldiers injured in trials; years of delays; uncertain future.
13	Dreadnought submarines (Trident replacement)	£31bn + £10bn contingency	Vast cost exposure; delays; MoD flagged affordability concerns.
14	Type 26 & Type 31 frigate procurement	Billions in overruns	Contract delays, price increases, shifting specifications.
15	F-35 procurement cost escalations	Tens of billions over lifetime	Unit cost inflation; sustainment costs far higher than early estimates.
16	MoD estate and housing outsourcing (CarillionAmey)	Hundreds of millions in failures	Poor maintenance, complaints, re-procurement needed; compensation and remediation.

---

D. INFRASTRUCTURE & TRANSPORT

No.	Programme	Est. Cost / Loss	What Happened
17	HS2 Phase 1 & cancelled northern leg	£40bn+ spent; Phase 1 now estimated £67bn	Chronic overruns; cancellations destroyed value; procurement failures.
18	Crossrail delays (Conservative oversight years)	>£4bn added to costs	Opening delayed nearly 4 years; mismanaged contracts.
19	Intercity Express Programme (Hitachi)	>£5bn	High procurement cost; infrastructure upgrades inadequate; expensive financing.
20	Smart Motorways	Billions spent; safety failures	Programme ended after major criticism; sunk costs unrecoverable.
21	PFI roads legacy & maintenance contracts	Tens of billions liabilities	Poor VfM from long-term contracts inherited and extended.
22	Thameslink Rolling Stock Programme	£multi-billion overruns	Complex procurement delays and renegotiations increased cost.

---

E. OUTSOURCING, PRIVATE CONTRACTORS & PUBLIC ADMIN

No.	Programme	Est. Cost / Loss	What Happened
23	Carillion collapse	£148m direct; wider systemic cost far larger	Government over-reliance on failing supplier; 2018 collapse caused major disruptions and bail-outs.
24	Capita – Army Recruitment	£495m → >£677m	Failed targets every year; IT system years late; increased costs.
25	G4S Olympic security failure	£284m contract; government had to supply troops	Contractor unable to provide staff; settlement required.
26	Serco electronic tagging fraud	>£100m overcharged historically	Charged for dead/offshore prisoners; fined; contracts restructured.
27	Atos disability assessments (WCA)	>£465m earned; costly transition & errors	Quality concerns; appeals burdened taxpayers; eventual exit and renewed procurement.
28	Universal Credit IT system	>£2bn; significant portion written off	Repeated redesigns; early system abandoned; large sunk costs.
29	Home Office – eBorders / successor systems	£1bn+	Cancellation, litigation with Raytheon; follow-on programmes delayed.
30	Probation privatisation (Transforming Rehabilitation / CRCs)	>£500m in losses; renationalisation	Outsourcing widely judged to have failed; government had to buy out contracts.
31	Housing maintenance outsourcing (various councils)	Hundreds of millions	Repeated failures by Carillion, Kier, Mitie, Amey; costly contract terminations.

---

F. EDUCATION & LOCAL GOVERNMENT

No.	Programme	Est. Cost / Loss	What Happened
32	Free Schools capital costs	Billions; some schools closed due to structural issues	Construction quality concerns; expensive temporary or emergency replacements.
33	RAAC concrete crisis (maintenance failures)	Billions in future repair liabilities	Years of under-investment in public-estate maintenance culminated in emergency closures.
34	Local authority outsourcing failures (multiple areas)	Billions cumulatively	Failed social-care, housing, and waste-management contracts requiring buy-backs and emergency re-insourcing.

The Bill for a Decade of Contract Mismanagement: How Conservative Governments from 2010 Saddled Britain with Tens of Billions in Waste, Overruns and Failure

When the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition entered office in 2010, it promised a new era of fiscal discipline, strict value-for-money tests, and an end to the “profligacy” of previous administrations. What followed instead was one of the most expensive periods of contracting, outsourcing and infrastructure mismanagement in modern British history. Over fourteen years, Conservative governments signed or oversaw hundreds of billions’ worth of contracts across health, defence, digital services, transport, construction and emergency response. A significant proportion of these were plagued by cost overruns, delays, substandard delivery, fraud, cancellations, litigation or outright collapse.

The resulting bill to the taxpayer is colossal. There is no single official figure because the losses are spread across dozens of departments and hundreds of contracts, many of which conceal true costs behind commercial confidentiality clauses. But by aggregating NAO reports, parliamentary committee findings, major investigations and audited accounts, a consistent picture emerges: tens of billions of pounds wasted, squandered or locked into poor-value long-term liabilities.

This article traces the major failures, sector by sector, to understand how government contracting spiralled so badly out of control.

The COVID-19 Procurement Meltdown: An Era-Defining Failure

No period better illustrates the weaknesses of the Conservative contracting model than the pandemic years of 2020–2022. COVID-19 created genuine emergency conditions requiring rapid action, but the processes chosen — namely, suspending competitive tendering almost wholesale and giving extraordinary discretion to ministers and civil servants — spawned one of the largest procurement scandals in British history.

PPE Contracts and the “VIP Lane”

During the first months of the pandemic, the government spent tens of billions on personal protective equipment. Much of this spending was necessary, but enormous portions were reckless. The so-called “VIP lane”, later ruled unlawful, funnelled suppliers with political connections to the front of the queue. Companies with little or no relevant experience won contracts worth hundreds of millions.

When the dust settled, vast quantities of PPE were found to be unusable — masks that didn’t meet safety standards, gowns that couldn’t be used clinically, and visors that fell apart. Government accounts recorded approximately £1.4bn worth of PPE as being destroyed, written off or unusable. Independent analysis suggests the true figure could be several times higher if opportunity costs and unexpired but unused stock are included.

Test and Trace: The £37 Billion Experiment

NHS Test and Trace is perhaps the clearest symbol of pandemic-era excess. Costing £37bn over two years, it became one of the most expensive public health programmes ever created. Yet its performance metrics were consistently poor. Local public-health teams often outperformed the outsourced national system, which relied extensively on corporate giants such as Serco.

The NAO criticised the programme for failing to build sufficient capacity at speed despite extraordinary spending. Many contracts were short-term, expensive, and lacked accountability mechanisms. The system failed to prevent large waves of infection, raising serious questions about what exactly taxpayers received for such an immense outlay.

Testing Contracts and Political Proximity

Other controversies included large testing contracts awarded without competition, some involving firms with political ties. The speed of procurement was undeniably important, but it came at the expense of due diligence, risk assessment and value-for-money controls. Once emergency rules were activated, oversight effectively collapsed.

The pandemic procurement fiasco is estimated to have cost the taxpayer tens of billions in waste, misappropriation, or poor-value spending. The most important legacy is not only financial but structural: it exposed deep vulnerabilities in the UK’s contracting processes, where urgency became indistinguishable from opportunism.

Defence Procurement: A Catalogue of Decay

The Ministry of Defence has long suffered from chronic procurement issues, but the 2010–2024 period stands out even by its own standards. Large defence programmes became notorious for delays and cost blowouts, undermining capability and ballooning budgets.

Nimrod MRA4: £4 Billion Literally Scrapped

One of the first major acts of the 2010 coalition was to cancel the Nimrod MRA4 maritime patrol aircraft programme. Although the decision arguably had operational logic, it resulted in the effective destruction of approximately £3.6–£4bn already spent. The aircraft were dismantled without entering service, leaving the UK without maritime patrol capability for years.

Ajax: A Vehicle That Injures Its Crew

Another infamous case is the Ajax armoured vehicle programme, valued at over £5.5bn. Designed to be a modern reconnaissance platform, Ajax became a rolling disaster. Trials revealed dangerous vibration and noise levels, injuring personnel and rendering the vehicles unsafe. Years behind schedule, the programme epitomised flawed project management and oversight.

The Dreadnought Trident Replacement

The replacement for Britain’s nuclear submarines is one of the largest defence projects ever undertaken. Estimated at £31bn with a further £10bn contingency, the Dreadnought programme is so vast that even small delays cost billions. Regular NAO reports warn of affordability pressures, overstretched project controls, and schedule risks that grow each year. While some of this spending is inevitable given the nature of nuclear deterrence, the scale of uncertainty and risk embedded in the project reflects deep procurement fragility.

Other Defence Failures

Other programmes — from Type 26 frigates to MoD housing outsourcing — suffered familiar patterns: shifting specifications, contractor underperformance, budget overruns and low morale among service personnel. The MoD estate management contract, partially delivered by CarillionAmey, caused widespread complaints and required remedial spending.

Defence procurement under Conservative governments became a revolving door of crisis management. Billions were lost not in isolated blunders but through systemic dysfunction.

Infrastructure Mega-Projects: HS2 and Beyond

If defence procurement symbolised long-term dysfunction, infrastructure procurement offered its own spectacular tribulations.

HS2: Britain’s Most Expensive Railway Lunges from Crisis to Crisis

HS2 began life as a bold vision: a new high-speed rail spine linking London with the Midlands and the North. When first announced, estimates suggested a cost of around £33bn. By the mid-2020s, that figure had more than doubled. The cancellation of the Birmingham–Manchester leg destroyed expected economic benefits and stranded billions already spent on preparatory works.

Key causes included:

• Contracts signed before designs were finalised
• Chronic optimism bias
• Inadequate geological surveys
• Political meddling
• Late-stage renegotiations inflating contractor costs

By 2025, with around £40bn already spent and the remaining stretch projected at up to £67bn, HS2 became a case study in how not to run a national infrastructure project.

Crossrail and Other Transport Failures

Crossrail, though eventually successful, overshot its budget by more than £4bn and opened almost four years late — under Conservative oversight of the Department for Transport. The Intercity Express Programme with Hitachi cost billions and faced criticism over financing and infrastructural compatibility issues.

Smart motorways, heavily promoted by Conservative transport secretaries, became a costly misadventure. Reports of safety risks led to the programme’s cancellation, leaving billions of sunk construction costs and future remediation liabilities.

The Outsourcing Model Collapses Under Its Own Weight

Outsourcing was supposed to make government leaner and cheaper. Instead, from 2010 onwards it often became more expensive, less reliable, and dangerously concentrated in a handful of corporate giants.

Carillion: The £148 Million Warning That Went Unheeded

When Carillion collapsed in 2018, it served as a dramatic indictment of over-reliance on a financially unstable contractor. The government had continued awarding contracts to the company even as its financial condition deteriorated. The immediate cost to taxpayers was £148m — but the wider impact on schools, hospitals, prisons and construction sites was far greater.

Capita and the Failed Army Recruitment Contract

Capita’s Army Recruiting Partnering Project became a symbol of outsourcing folly. Recruitment targets were missed every single year. The online system arrived four years late. Costs rose from around £495m to over £675m. The Army found itself short of soldiers while taxpayers footed the bill for corporate failure.

Probation Privatisation: A Catastrophic Experiment

The Transforming Rehabilitation programme, launched in 2014, broke up probation services and outsourced much of the work to private Community Rehabilitation Companies. The model failed so badly — with rising reoffending rates and collapsing service quality — that the government was forced to renationalise probation in 2021 at a cost of hundreds of millions.

Serco, G4S and Atos: A Trilogy of Repeated Failures

Serco’s overcharging on electronic tagging, G4S’s failure to provide Olympic security (requiring troop deployment at short notice), and Atos’s widely criticised disability assessments (leading to a costly appeals backlog) all demonstrate the recurring pattern: when services are outsourced to corporate giants, taxpayers often pay more when things go wrong.

The Hidden Costs: Appeals, Oversight and Renegotiation

Poorly performing contracts often generate downstream costs:

• legal settlements
• appeals (e.g. disability benefit decisions overturned)
• emergency re-procurement
• penalties
• administrative burdens

These are rarely included in headline contract values but cumulatively reach billions.

Digital Government and IT Disasters

The Conservative era also saw some of the most expensive public IT failures in British history.

Universal Credit IT System

The Universal Credit programme’s IT system had to be repeatedly rebuilt. Early versions were abandoned entirely, with hundreds of millions written off. The final system cost over £2bn, yet still suffered reliability and usability issues.

eBorders and Successor Programmes

The Home Office spent more than a billion pounds on eBorders and its successor systems, including costly litigation with Raytheon after contract termination. Border security and immigration enforcement were left relying on outdated systems for years.

NHS Digital Programmes

Large parts of the NHS’s digital transformation agenda ran over budget or were quietly cancelled, including components of the National Programme for IT continued into the 2010s. Billions were spent on systems that trusts ultimately rejected.

Education, Housing, Local Government and Estates

The Conservative period also saw substantial failures across the public estate.

Free Schools and Construction Failures

The free schools programme created new capacity but at high cost. Several free schools had to close, relocate or rebuild due to construction flaws. Capital projections repeatedly overshot initial budgets.

RAAC Concrete Crisis

Years of under-investment in public estate maintenance manifested in 2023–2024 when unsafe Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete was discovered in schools, hospitals and courts. The remediation bill is expected to run into billions — a direct consequence of deferring maintenance and relying on ageing private-finance-built structures.

Local Government Outsourcing Collapses

Multiple councils — notably Northamptonshire, Birmingham, Thurrock and Croydon — suffered severe financial distress linked partly to aggressive outsourcing, asset-leveraging schemes, or risky investment vehicles. These failures are not single “contracts”, but they stem from contracting models encouraged in the austerity years and required emergency government bailouts.

Why Did So Much Go Wrong? Six Structural Causes

Across all sectors, similar patterns recur.

1. Ideological Over-Reliance on Outsourcing

After 2010, outsourcing became a default option rather than an evidence-based choice. Contracts were often awarded to the same handful of large suppliers, creating systemic dependency. When a company like Carillion or Capita failed, the impact rippled across services.

2. Shrinking Civil Service Capacity

Austerity-era staff cuts reduced the government’s in-house expertise. Departments increasingly depended on consultants or contractors to design, implement and monitor programmes. Weak contract management led to cost-spirals.

3. Contracts Signed Before Plans Were Ready

Major programmes — HS2, Ajax, Universal Credit — were launched before full designs, requirements or feasibility studies were complete. This guaranteed later cost increases.

4. Poor Risk Allocation

Contracts often placed risks nominally on private suppliers, but when failure loomed, the government had no choice but to intervene or renegotiate — effectively socialising losses while privatising gains.

5. Political Timetables Overriding Practicality

Election cycles, ministerial reshuffles and shifting political priorities repeatedly distorted project timelines, especially for HS2 and digital programmes. Short-term political incentives trumped long-term planning.

6. Lack of Transparency and Accountability

Commercial confidentiality clauses shielded many contracts from scrutiny. Oversight bodies such as the NAO often discovered problems only years after damage was done.

A Decade in Summary: The Cost to the Nation

Combining the major documented failures listed in the table, the Conservative contracting record since 2010 shows:

• £37bn COVID Test & Trace
• £1.4bn+ PPE write-offs (with much higher opportunity losses)
• Up to £67bn for HS2 Phase 1 alone
• £3.6–£4bn Nimrod write-off
• £5.5bn Ajax vehicles still unusable
• £31bn + £10bn contingency for Dreadnought
• £148m+ Carillion collapse cost
• £2bn+ Universal Credit IT costs
• £500m+ probation outsourcing losses
• £4bn+ Crossrail overruns
• Billions in Smart Motorway sunk costs
• Hundreds of millions in tagging, security and assessment failures
• Tens of billions in PFI long-term liabilities

Even conservatively, the combined total easily exceeds £100–150 billion in losses, overruns and liabilities linked to contracting.

This is not to say every pound was wasted. Major national infrastructure inevitably costs money. Defence programmes are complex by nature. And pandemic emergency procurement had to be fast. But the consistent pattern across 14 years shows:

• avoidable waste
• predictable failures
• poorly designed contracts
• weak oversight
• political interference
• and a deeply flawed dependency on outsourcing giants

British taxpayers have paid a staggering price for these failures.

Lessons for the Future

The next era of British public administration must confront the consequences of the Conservative governments’ contracting legacy. The evidence points overwhelmingly to the need for:

• stronger public-sector delivery capacity
• tighter procurement rules
• earlier feasibility studies
• transparency requirements for all large contracts
• diversified supplier bases
• and an end to ideological outsourcing

Without such reforms, the waste of the 2010–2024 period will be repeated. Britain cannot afford another decade of multibillion-pound mismanagement.