UK Home Office hikes tech consultant spend to £350M despite pledge to cut costs The UK Home Office has upped its planned spending on external data and tech consultants by £100 million to a maximum of £350 million. The move follows a six-month delay to the start of a deal designed to provide external skills for the central government department's Data Services & Analytics (DSA) service. This comes despite …
IR35 doing exactly what it was designed to do: drive out SMEs, hollow out internal capability, and funnel ever larger cheques to the usual suspects. Now procurement is slower, costlier, and more dependent on Accenture et al., while any incentive to build or retain in-house skills has vanished. Bravo.
Probably below market rates. The 'prestige' of working at the Home Office doesn't pay the bills.
-> The HO can only attract low end people.
-> These don't know anythings have to bring in consultants.
-> The consultants charge an arm and a leg.
-> The don't know anythings think they know what they are doing.
-> The costs overrun because the don't know anythings don't know anything.
And so the cycle continues.
-> The consultants charge an arm and a leg.
Consultancies charge arm and leg, if they subcontract to consultants, they just get scraps. People have misconceptions where the actual value of the contract is captured.
For instance, consultancy could charge £1,500 or more a day for a resource. Then they will subcontract the role to a poor soul who will get £500 a day inside IR35 and pocket the difference or send their employee getting paid £60k pa.
" ... > These don't know anythings have to bring in consultants.
-> The consultants charge an arm and a leg.
-> The don't know anythings think they know what they are doing.
-> The costs overrun because the don't know anythings don't know anything."
Exactly this, plus I can tell you, having been involved with several government "initiatives" that their contracts are measured by the kilogram of paper (or megabyte of PDF) when you get them. They also include that you have to be registered to a collection of ISO standards (9001, 14001 etc etc), be Cyber Certified, be a member of a certain golf club .... (ok I made the last part up).
My previous company quoted for a government project worth about £250,000 to us, we were then told that we would need as a minimum to be ISO 9001 and Cyber Essentials compliant and be audited despite not having or needing any confidential information to do the work. We were quoted almost £10,000 for Cyber Essentials and also told that our server would need to be replaced as it didn't have the latest version of Windows on it (Win 8 had just come out) and that we'd have to replace our previous versions of MS Office with current versions plus install Win 8 on all our laptops. We estimated that we would have to spend at least 10 man days getting prepared for ISO 9001 and then another £2,000 to be audited against the standard. As all the work we were doing was bespoke, the only relevance of 9001 was to have a formal procedure for writing our reports (which are all bespoke pieces of work) and also to have a formal procedure for customer interactions and a register of feedback and any complaints.
In the end we decided not to do the project and 3 months later we were asked to tender again when the selected consultancy cocked the job up! This time with the ISO and Cyber security requirements omitted!
The other big issue is that consultan(cies) are often selected by the "my mother's uncle Joe's sister in law knows a man who does ..."
It goes even further. For most government contracts, the company tendering also has to show financial stability and have clear credit checks going back a number of years.
The format of the submitted tender is also fixed (which is probably the requirement for latest versions of Office), and the amount of information they need to include vastly outweighs what you would expect for most smaller projects. The tendering process is so stacked against even medium sized companies it's no wonder only the larger ones bother applying.
Yep, once worked on a Gov project where 4 civil servant "managers" would spend all day in meetings, larking about, joking around, have expensive lunches all fully re-imbursed while 3 of us actually did all the coding and project work. We'd submit weekly reports and these so-called managers would simply copy what we wrote and submit it back to their overlords with BS added to show they were doing something. Only one of the 4 I had any time for as he was genuinely trying to help us manage the project, the others were a waste of space.
I worked in the Home Office for a couple of decades, finishing my career as someone who could devise successful systems and rescue others. I wasn't formally qualified nor paid consultancy rates, but I understood the both the business and the capabilities of the then current technology. So they finally drove me into early retirement and I've watched as huge sums and effort have been lavished on essentially quite basic projects . When I entered the dark side of commercial consulting, they told me the golden rule: work out how to sell more consultancy, never mind delivering the solution.
I've applied for Home Office IT jobs numerous times, and am consistantly turned down for failing their "Civil Service skills assessment" which measures your ability to read unknown strangers' minds and plan hotel bookings and know in-house procedures before actually working there, with multiple-choice questions where there is no "how the hell do *I* know, *YOU* are the one working there" answer..
I'm employed by a consultancy, and work with a government department to create a website that will ultimately save the government money. We aren't that expensive, and - I don't want to toot my own horn - but my input has been to absolutely smash this government department's ideas on how to test such websites, and it's being rolled out to other departments. It's bringing efficiencies and saving more money.
In short, consultancies can often save the government money.
Like any person who's been in one place for their entire career, a civil servant can get stuck in a rut, and do the same thing over and again. You never really change or improve your ways of working, so when a consultancy comes in with fresh ideas it mixes things up and it often improves things.
Consultancies aren't the bad guy; poor decisions by rigid civil servants and government ministers who think in the short-term only are the problem.
