A small business like Care Images wouldn’t dream of criticising the multi-billion public spending habits of our esteemed government. Fortunately for us, one of the country’s top entrepreneurs, Sir Philip Green has done just that and the results make incredible reading.

Wasting up to £600m on telecommunications alone should be enough to make we poor taxpayers become Luddites. And as Sir Philip points out, making changes will not affect one job, it would simply mean that suppliers would be given work according to need instead of greed.

London 2012 Olympic logo

Rustle a brand and nick half a million from the taxpayer

It has always surprised me how little accountability there is in public spending. I know this from both sides of the fence – as a former social services commissioning manager and managing two companies which tender for work. The best example of waste with the public purse is undoubtedly the 2012 Olympic ‘logo’ which cost a staggering £400,000, the bill raised with no embarrassment by brand consultants Wolff Olins. This kind of garbage may well be the ‘next best thing’ among the N5 dinner circuit but if my 10 year-old came home from school having created something similar in art, I’d sue the local education authority.

I hope the government will listen to Sir Philip and do something about the wastage in Whitehall and it would be good to start with the consultants and ‘experts’ who stand by their ubiquitous flip charts mouthing complete nonsense in order to have the right to raise invoices of thousands of pounds a day. There is no way Sir Philip would fall for this kind of nonsense, which is why he is rich, and the government and the rest of us are poor.