WIREDGOV

Most leadership teams I have worked alongside know the size of their budget gap to the pound. The finance team has done the work, the figure is on the spreadsheet, the board has been briefed. And in almost every case, the real number is bigger. Not because anyone has got their sums wrong. Because the deficit an organisation can see is rarely the deficit it has. I see it in councils, universities, and the regulated industries we work with. The shape is the same. 

This is not a criticism. Organisations under sustained pressure rarely have room for the structured look at the whole estate that would reveal the full picture. Whether the pressure is a funding settlement, a regulatory shift, or a change of leadership, the people doing the work know better than anyone that visibility is the first thing to go. 

The new Local Government Finance Settlement is the version playing out most publicly right now. £83.5bn in 2026-27, rising to £90.5bn by 2028-29. The first multi-year settlement in a decade. None of it, on its own, will close the gap the Institute for Government has identified: spending power in 2028-29 still 2.7% below 2010-11 in real terms. What councils do with it, and what every leadership team facing a similar gap takes from it, is the question. 

What the visibility gap looks like 

In Wales, one council has answered that question. We worked alongside Caerphilly County Borough Council from 2023. They began with an assumed deficit of £37m. Six weeks of structured discovery, looking at projects in flight, supplier contracts, spend patterns and demand, revised the figure to £45m. By the end the real number was £65m. 

The deficit had not got worse. It had got visible. 

That progression is the pattern, not the exception, and not confined to councils. Most large organisations run on a partial view of themselves: hundreds of live projects with no single owner, suppliers whose products are half-used, processes built around an operating model nobody has revisited in a decade. Each is a place where money is leaking. None shows up on the budget gap. 

The organisations succeeding are not the ones with the cleverest savings plans. They are the ones that have put the whole operation in a single view, then made decisions against that view, in public, at pace. 

Click here for the full press release