Controlling government expenditure by external review: The 1921—2 “Geddes Axe”

Abstract

The Lloyd George-appointed Committee on National Expenditure (Geddes Committee), charged with reducing projected 1922—3 Supply Expenditure by £100m comprised outstanding businessmen who employed an extraordinary range of techniques and approaches, some of great antiquity (but nowadays thought to be “modern”), and others genuinely novel, to lay the groundwork for returning British public expenditure to a peace-time footing following a post-Armistice budgetary crisis. Drawing mostly on documents lodged at the UK National Archives, the methodologies and political, institutional and behavioural dynamics of Committee operations are analysed to show how it achieved arguably the most profound analysis of British public expenditure ever undertaken.