UK agriculture department slammed for paper pushing despite tech splurges The UK agriculture department is "working towards" getting consultant and contractor numbers down to less than a quarter of its tech and digital transformation teams and reducing contingent labor to 12 percent of headcount by the end of the financial year. The Department for Environment, Farming & Rural Affairs (Defra) was …
The big problem with online-only government services is that when any part of the tech chain fails (and it does - quite frequently and seemingly increasingly often) everything stops in its tracks. There should always be a fallback option, particularly where interactions have legal implications.
In a way I can understand why Defra, of all departments, could be a bit behind the curve on adopting online stuff. A lot of those forms will be to/from farmers, who tend to live in rural - often very remote - locations. Just this week there was something of a celebratory story in the local news about how a number of farms along a particular valley have just been connected up to mains electricity.
5. PAC conclusion: Defra is over-reliant on contractors because it struggles torecruit and retain the people with the digital skills it needs.
Public sector struggles to recruit skilled workers because of the way system has been created to facilitate hiring big consultancies instead.
This is because public sector can't pay the market rates directly to employees, but they can pay over the market to big consultancies (market rate employee salary plus huge big consultancy mark up).
This looks like a nudge to abandon cheaper contractors and outsource the work to the usual suspects, as there seems to be no suggestion of how are they going to adjust the pay scales to attract talent.
Senior civil servants are certainly against it: "Why some teenage looking pimpled geek basically sitting behind tiny laptop in the comfort of home sofa should be earning more money than me?" and it's back to square one.
So, they're aiming to fire 88% of their "contingent".
Does that mean they're going to fire 88% of administrative busybodies ? And nobody has gone on strike yet ?
Wow. Talk about double standards. Google fires 25 people and it's headline news. A UK Gov administration is looking to reduce headcount by 88% and it would seem that that's just worthy of a throwaway line in one sentence of a 14-paragraphe article.
Where's the angst ? Where's the revolt ?
Oh, I forgot. It's administration. Bureaucrats do not know how to revolt.
If it’s 15% now then they’d reduce the number of people that fit this category by 20% to get to 12%. Overall this would reduce the total number of people by 3% and so be left with 97% of what they had before.
Hope that worked example helps!
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