Who's Spending Britain's Billions? Jacques Perreti has the answers

Tuesday night's star documentary, Who's Spending Britain's Billions? premieres on BBC2 at 8pm and follows reporter Jacques Peretti venturing beyond the well-known budgets of schools, hospitals and foreign aid to seek answers.

He will look into the range of taxation projects that the public are less than familiar with and discovers that local councils across the UK are signing contracts with management consultancy firms, who can take a percentage of any savings they find.

The investigative journalist is demonstrably angry about waste in the public sector – giving us a glimpse of a vast aircraft carrier being built in Scotland in an early scene. The original budgeted cost for a pair of these new ships was initially £3.6 million. The actual cost so far is £6bn. By the time they are in service, the expected final cost is estimated to be a jaw-dropping £12bn.

The shock start no doubt reels the audience in, but there's a lot more to be fished out. Peretti doesn't focus too much on where megaprojects such as this go wrong – but on how local authorities pay management consultants huge sums of money for "operating model assessments" and "transformation programmes". It is revealed that the firms often take a chunk of the percentage for themselves.

Peretti uncovers that hundreds of the millions of taxpayers' pounds is spent on contracts covered by confidential deals – meaning that very little information is known about them. He ponders on whether the public deserves to know more about how their money is being spent and managed.

Get enlightened and find out for yourselves as Who's Spending Britain's Billions? airs tonight at 8pm on BBC2.