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The Treasury is to tell UK government departments to co-operate better to cut wasteful spending in areas ranging from NHS treatment to buildings maintenance.
James Murray, chief secretary to the Treasury, will begin a series of reviews into government spending designed to find efficiencies by improving the way money flows across Whitehall departments.
Outside experts will be brought in to help Murray assess where government initiatives can be more joined-up, with a view to reallocating funding at next year’s spending review.
The NHS push to move healthcare out of hospitals is one of four areas selected for review, along with homelessness, youth services and infrastructure management. Officials said these areas offered the greatest potential to find better ways of spending public money.
“These reviews will scrutinise government programmes to ensure they improve people’s lives while rooting out wasteful spend from the public sector,” Murray said.
“We have a duty to taxpayers to make sure every pound of their money works as hard in government as the people who earn it.”
The government’s 10-year plan for the NHS, published last year, promised to move more care out of hospitals into local clinics, a long-standing health service goal that has had only patchy success. Murray will aim to find ways to better link up local services such as mental health and social care to offer patients alternatives to hospitals, which currently absorb most of NHS England’s £196bn budget.
In a homelessness strategy published before Christmas, ministers criticised how £3.7bn a year had been spent on homelessness in England. The strategy described a “cycle of crisis” that had seen costs of temporary accommodation double in two years while services to keep people in their homes had been cut.
More than 380,000 people in England are estimated to be homeless, the majority in temporary accommodation, which can cost councils as much as £30,000 a year per family. More than 4,600 people were sleeping rough on the most recent night surveyed by the government in 2024.
Lígia Teixeira, chief executive of the Centre for Homelessness Impact, welcomed the review, arguing that “a value-for-money approach that takes a whole-system view can help shift investment upstream”.
She said: “The evidence is clear that the current system drives spending towards late, crisis responses, particularly temporary accommodation, which are costly and deliver poor outcomes over time. The answer is not to weaken protections or reduce access to temporary accommodation, but to redesign the system so fewer people need it in the first place.”
Murray will look at how other public services, including the NHS, police and jobcentres, can do more to prevent people becoming homeless.
The Treasury also sees the £1bn a year spent on provision for young people, including youth and sports clubs, as too fragmented across multiple departments. It wants departments to take more long-term decisions on maintenance of roads, public buildings and other infrastructure.
While ministers and officials have long complained about Whitehall budget silos, Treasury officials have the power to move money between departments to places where it can be spent most effectively.
Murray is due to feed into a government spending review next year, which will set departmental budgets for 2028-29 and 2029-2030. If it succeeds in finding efficiencies, the same cross-government approach will be taken with other areas of public spending.
