U.K. Government Reorganizations Cost $1.2 Billion, Auditor Says

March 18 (Bloomberg) -- Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government spent more than 780 million pounds ($1.2 billion) on reorganizing its departments with no way of tracking any tangible benefits of the changes, the U.K.’s auditor said.

In a report published today, the National Audit Office said it was impossible to show that the changes made since the 2005 general election offered value for money. It said there was a risk that public bodies were carrying out reorganizations “unnecessarily.”

“With 90 reorganizations in four years, U.K central government machinery is in a constant state of change,” the head of the NAO, Amyas Morse, said in an e-mailed statement. “At approximately 200 million pounds per annum, the costs are far from negligible and the reorganizations inevitably involve disruption and loss of service.”

Since 1980, 25 new central-government departments have been created, including 13 that no longer exist. By comparison, only two new departments have been created in the U.S. over the same period, the auditor said. Morse called for a “more deliberate and carefully planned process” in the U.K. and a “slowdown in the rate of change.”

“Gordon Brown has had a reckless attitude to spending to our money,” the opposition Conservatives’ Cabinet Office spokesman, Francis Maude, said in an e-mail. “This Labour government’s obsession with pointless reorganizations and branding projects has come at the expense of actually dealing with the pressing social and economic problems blighting the country.”