A quango that hands out £8 billion of taxpayers’ money a year has failed to achieve the “efficiencies” it was set up to oversee – instead ballooning by a fifth since its creation, an official review has found.
The number of directors at UKRI, the government body responsible for funding research and innovation, has increased by 50 per cent in the last four years, despite the body being set up in 2018 to “deliver a step-change in administrative efficiency”.
A government-commissioned review concluded that “inefficiencies” at UKRI appeared in “different but connected ways”, with “the most visible evidence…seen in increased staff and headcount levels”.
As Parkinson shows us, this is just how bureaucracy works. And the body which funds science should follow the science, right?
I thought I had seen some bullshit self-congratulatory sets of accounts in my time but this, all 188 pages of it, takes some beating.
136 bloody directors. A total payroll of £522 million at an average rate of over £62k per person.
As for total annual expenditure it’s the simplest £8bn annual savings a chancellor could ever wish for.
“They’d none of ‘em be missed, they’d none of ‘em be missed”
There’s no doubt the UK’s institutionally fucked.
It might be worth asking where you get your governmental class from.
How many of them have actual STEM degrees? Not {some word} Science degrees?
@MG: what, like Whitty, Vallance, Fauci, Birx, et al? And still you assume that a STEM degree must be good!
@dearieme
At least with a STEM degree you stand a chance of getting a useful outcome. What kind of innovation leadership are you going to get from a Grievance Scientist?
“A government-commissioned review concluded that “inefficiencies” at UKRI appeared in “different but connected ways”, with “the most visible evidence…seen in increased staff and headcount levels”.”
Does this actually make any sense?
Like all “government-commissioned reviews” the world is a little worse for its existence.