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The UK government is unable to hit its cost-cutting targets on consultants because it does not know how much it is spending on them, according to a parliamentary report.

The public accounts committee said on Wednesday that the government was unable to meet its own goal to stop all non-essential spending on consultants because of a lack of accurate data, which it claimed stopped ministers from being able to set “meaningful targets”.

The government “seems unconcerned at the many and obvious inaccuracies in its own data on the potential billions in taxpayer money that departments are spending on consultants”, the committee said.

The Cabinet Office relies on each department to develop its own internal methods for handling and tracking spending but approaches “vary”, leading to “inconsistent” data, the report said. HM Treasury estimated a spend of £1.36bn in 2022-23, but other sources put the figure as high as £2.23bn, according to a National Audit Office report last year. 

“Given these problems, and its seemingly indifferent position on the matter, it is clear that the Cabinet Office does not have a grip on what government spends on consultants,” the report said.

Sir Keir Starmer’s government pledged in 2024 to halve spending on consultants after it rose to record levels due to the administrative burden of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. The move aimed to save the taxpayer more than £1.2bn by 2026.

Civil servants were told that all big new Whitehall consultancy contracts had to be signed off by a department’s most senior official or the relevant cabinet minister. 

But the government has struggled to prove the measures have been effective. Central government cut consultancy costs by 14 per cent in the year ending March 2025, according to an FT analysis of annual accounts for core departments and their arm’s-length bodies.

The public accounts committee’s report added that government departments were not complying with Cabinet Office directives on consultancy spend. Whether they were complying with the guidelines was going “unmonitored”, the committee said, urging the government to provide a list of which departments did not do so.

Another problem was that large contracts combined consultancy with other professional services, the committee said, making it difficult to track consultancy spending and allowing departments to reclassify and under-report — rather than reduce — their spending on consultants. 

“The confusion of professional services and consulting does potentially open up a real opportunity for obfuscation for departments and the industry,” said Andrew Sturdy, a professor of management and organisation at the University of Bristol Business School.

The UK government had previously tried to reduce the use of advisers in Whitehall, including by launching an in-house consultancy arm during the last parliament informally called the “Crown Consultancy”, but the project was scrapped shortly after.

Clive Betts MP, deputy chair of the public accounts committee, said: “With consultancy spend now wound so tightly into how departments run their contracted-out work, and with so little and such inconsistent data available, actually bearing down on this spending will be a tough knot to unpick.”

A government spokesperson said: “This government is relentlessly rooting out waste to protect taxpayer money and make the state more efficient.

“We have already met our target to reduce consultancy spending by more than £550mn in 2025, and are reducing back office costs by 16 per cent to save £2.2bn a year by 2030.”