Last year, government departments published a wave of efficiency plans setting out how they would reduce waste and improve productivity. Since then, those plans have moved from paper into reality through a mix of delivery targets, voluntary exit schemes and, the Budget 2025. Efficiency is no longer a side conversation; it’s a sustained priority.
More recently, the government has announced a new initiative to bring expert scrutiny to public service inefficiencies and waste. That focus is welcome. But it also raises an important question: what do we actually mean by “waste” in government, what would it really take to remove it, and will the initiative be looking for the right thing?
This matters not just for public finances, but for sustainability too. Wasted time, duplicated systems and unnecessary processes don’t just cost money. They consume energy, materials and human effort, and they lock organisations into patterns of work that are hard to sustain over the long term.
Waste is rarely just about money
When people talk about waste in government, the debate often collapses into cost. But that framing misses something fundamental. Much of the waste experienced by civil servants shows up as misdirected effort: hours spent working around broken systems, repeating tasks that add no value, or navigating layers of approval that exist to manage risk rather than enable delivery.
That kind of waste has a carbon footprint as well as a financial one. Extra meetings mean extra travel or energy use. Manual workarounds keep legacy systems running longer than they should. Duplicate platforms mean duplicate infrastructure, support contracts and data processing. None of that is neutral from a sustainability perspective.
This is one of the clearest lessons from our research last year comparing departmental efficiency plans with civil servants’ lived experience of waste in day-to-day delivery. The plans showed strong intent, particularly around digital reform and automation. But the waste people feel most acutely is often rooted in how services and organisations are designed, not in a lack of effort or commitment.
Efficiency without redesign risks shifting the problem
One of the risks with any efficiency drive is that it focuses on making existing activity cheaper or faster, rather than asking whether that activity should exist at all. Automating a flawed process can reduce unit cost while increasing overall demand. Digitising a broken workflow can entrench it for another decade.
From a sustainability lens, that matters. Energy-intensive technology layered onto inefficient processes can increase emissions even as headline productivity metrics improve. This is where efficiency and net zero agendas quietly collide.
True waste reduction usually comes from redesign: removing steps, simplifying decision-making, and preventing problems before they generate work. Those changes tend to reduce cost, time and carbon together. But they are harder to measure in-year and harder to sponsor, which means they often lose out to more visible savings.
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Time is the hidden sustainability lever
One of the strongest signals from civil servants is that time is the most visible form of waste in government. Time spent on low-value administration, unnecessary coordination and rework is time that could be used to improve services, develop skills or reduce avoidable demand.
From a sustainability perspective, time matters because it correlates directly with energy use. The longer systems run, the more they consume. The more people are pulled into avoidable activity, the more resource-intensive delivery becomes.
Seen this way, freeing up time is not just a productivity win. It is a sustainability intervention.
Measuring the right things
What government chooses to measure shapes what it values. Traditional efficiency metrics tend to prioritise short-term, easily quantifiable savings. That can make it difficult to justify investment in skills, service redesign or system integration, even when those changes would remove waste more permanently.
There are parallels here with sustainability. We are comfortable measuring energy consumption and emissions, but much less comfortable measuring the carbon cost of duplication, delay or avoidable demand. Until those connections are made more visible, waste will continue to hide in plain sight.
A moment to connect the dots
The renewed focus on efficiency, combined with expert scrutiny of waste, creates an opportunity to broaden the conversation. Waste is not just a budgeting problem or a performance issue. It is a design, governance and leadership challenge, with direct implications for sustainability.
Reducing wasted time, money and energy should not be treated as separate agendas. When government removes unnecessary work, simplifies systems and designs services that work first time, it delivers better outcomes for citizens, for staff and for the environment.
That feels like the right direction of travel. The challenge now is making sure we are removing waste, not just moving it around.
