Spending Smarter: Lessons from the UK’s Office for Value for Money
Happy Tuesday, Transformation Friends. Another week, another opportunity to go Beyond the Status Quo.
Governments everywhere are feeling the squeeze: rising expectations, shrinking budgets and workforces, and complex delivery challenges.
In response, the United Kingdom established the Office for Value for Money (OVfM) within HM Treasury in late 2023 to support a Spending Review and improve the way government spending is planned, assessed, and delivered.
Today we explore why the UK created this office, how it’s structured to deliver impact, and what lessons we can apply to our own organisations, even at a much smaller scale.
So grab your morning coffee, and let’s get started.
Why the UK Created the OVfM
The OVfM emerged from recognizing that good intentions and policy ambition are not enough. Public spending can drift without a clear focus on outcomes, resulting in duplication, waste, or missed opportunities. The UK needed a way to challenge this pattern and make value for money a foundational principle, not an afterthought.
The unit was set up with a clear objective: to improve how the UK government assesses, delivers, and evaluates public spending.
In particular, it focuses on high-risk areas, where multiple departments contribute to complex delivery chains. These are exactly the situations where accountability can blur, and inefficiencies creep in.
Rather than relying solely on traditional oversight tools like audit and evaluation, the UK Treasury wanted something more proactive and embedded. The OVfM is designed to operate in real-time, supporting investment decisions before the money is spent and helping departments plan and deliver more strategically.
The UK’s Approach: Practical, Focused, and Collaborative
The OVfM is intentionally lean. It is a time-limited unit, designed to make a big impact in a short window, with a mandate to advise the Treasury during the current spending review period. Rather than creating a large, permanent body, the UK Treasury opted for a focused and nimble team that could operate with urgency and flexibility, providing high-value insight when it is most needed.
The OVfM applies a structured, repeatable approach grounded in analysis, challenge, and partnership. It is not an auditing body, nor a performance measurement unit. It works alongside departments to:
Study high-risk policy areas (where multiple players and unclear accountability can derail outcomes)
Assess investment proposals using clear, repeatable criteria
Support strategic delivery by building capability and improving
To deliver on this purpose, the OVfM uses three key mechanisms that reinforce each other: value-for-money studies, investment appraisal criteria, and continuous evaluation and learning.
Value-for-Money Studies
These are in-depth, cross-cutting assessments of high-risk policy areas, particularly where responsibilities span multiple departments or involve complex delivery chains. The OVfM leads these studies to explore whether programs are achieving their intended outcomes and whether they represent a worthwhile use of public funds.
Importantly, the goal is not to assign blame.
Instead, the focus is on collaborative learning: identifying inefficiencies, overlaps, or delivery risks and using evidence to generate practical options for reform. Departments are involved throughout the process, ensuring findings are relevant, feasible, and actionable.
Investment Appraisal Criteria
To inform spending review decisions, the OVfM developed a consistent framework for assessing the quality of investment proposals. These criteria focus on several key questions, like:
Does the proposal clearly define its objectives?
Is it aligned with cross-government priorities?
Does the delivery team have the capability and track record to execute it
Have lessons from previous, similar investments been incorporated?
Is the financial and delivery plan realistic?
This structure helps cut through optimism bias and makes it easier to challenge assumptions. You can find more great questions to ask on the OVfM Investment appraisal criteria page.
Evaluation and Learning
The OVfM also commits to learning from its own work. Through a light-touch evaluation plan, it collects feedback on the impact of its studies and appraisals, the usefulness of its recommendations, and the quality of engagement with departments.
This self-evaluation is used to improve internal processes, identify gaps in capability, and inform decisions about the future of the model itself. Rather than defending past decisions, the emphasis is on continuous improvement. This ensures that the office remains relevant, responsive, and effective over time.
Lessons We Can Apply at Home
We may not have a national treasury behind us. Still, the OVfM model offers practical ideas that can be scaled to fit our organizations on a smaller scale.
Here’s how I see it.
1. Make Value a Shared Responsibility
The OVfM model demonstrates that value should be a shared responsibility across program, policy, delivery, and finance functions. Building this culture requires intentional steps:
Define value metrics early, before initiatives are launched, and ensure they reflect both efficiency and outcomes.
Embed a "challenge function" in planning processes to ask tough questions and test assumptions without being adversarial.
Host joint planning or review sessions where multiple functions come together to explore if an initiative is on track to deliver its intended value.
Creating shared ownership of value reinforces accountability and breaks down the silos that often undermine delivery.
2. Focus on High-Risk, Cross-Cutting Issues
The OVfM targets areas where spending is significant, risk is high, and multiple players are involved. These are often the areas where nobody owns the full picture.
In your organization:
Identify priority areas where multiple business lines or teams contribute to a shared goal, but coordination is weak.
Map decision points and data gaps to understand where risks are emerging.
Set up temporary task teams to focus specifically on these thorny issues, with a mandate to recommend actionable changes.
Don’t try to boil the ocean. Focus your efforts where confusion or duplication is costing you the most.
3. Build a Simple Review Framework
One of the OVfM’s most practical contributions is a checklist of criteria for assessing proposals. This doesn’t require a new system or software. You just need a commitment to asking the right questions.
You can build your own framework by:
Drafting five to ten core review questions to apply at intake, mid-point, or during project planning (take inspiration from the OVfM’s questions linked above).
Focusing on clarity of objectives, delivery readiness, past lessons, alignment with strategic goals, and financial realism.
Making the review process transparent and repeatable so that staff understand how proposals are assessed and improved.
This approach improves quality without adding red tape.
4. Use Time-Limited Units to Accelerate Change
Permanent structures often struggle to do new things quickly. The OVfM’s short-term, focused nature gives it the space to challenge, learn, and recommend without the constraints of long-term bureaucratic roles.
To replicate this:
Set up small, fixed-term teams with a clear mandate and access to leadership.
Use them to explore a specific challenge, review a portfolio of work, or pilot a new approach.
Ensure they have independence and visibility—and disband or evolve them once their task is complete.
These "pop-up" models offer a practical way to break through inertia and make focused progress on complex issues.
The UK model is designed for impact over permanence. Sometimes, creating a dedicated (but temporary) team focused on solving a specific strategic issue is more effective than reworking permanent structures. A pop-up review team or task force can be stood up quickly with the right people. And, if it is given the right authority, can unlock real improvements.
Wrap up
The UK’s Office for Value for Money is an excellent blueprint for smarter spending, and I think it’s very adaptable on a smaller scale. It reminds us that discipline doesn’t have to mean delay. That being critical can still be collaborative. And that small teams, with the right mandate, can create big shifts.
Reflective questions to take away:
What are your organization's high-risk, cross-cutting issues, and who’s responsible for their success?
How might you embed a "challenge function" into your planning processes without creating gridlock?
What would it take to build a culture where identifying delivery risks and questioning assumptions is seen as a shared responsibility, not an exception?
Until next time, stay curious and I’ll see you Beyond the Status Quo.