Whitehall waste: Cash splashed on consultants and temps up 90% in half decade Taxpayers cash that government spends on consultants and temporary staff has soared by up to 90 per cent over the last five years to £1.3bn, as Whitehall struggled to build technical skills in-house, an official report confirmed. The Committee of Public Accounts probe into temp costs found departments’ overall spending had …
Whitehall / Local Government / NHS:
"Save" money in the lean times by employing specialist consultants and temps during busy periods to avoid over staffing.
Although, from the article '...departments will find it difficult to retain these recruits while the civil service lacks a clear career path for successful project delivery' - Seriously? Why plan for something that has never happened :-)
But doing that requires increasing the headcount - supposing that salaries are attractive enough to get qualified people there in the first place (I have doubts on that).
Then departments get criticized for being staff-heavy, so they lay staff off.
Then departments get criticized because they are slow and inefficient, so they hire temps while "a more permanent solution is found".
Now we criticize them for having all those temps. Return to step one and start over again.
There is no way that circle will ever be broken.
We need a merry-go-round icon.
Along with "We will identify and cut waste."
Naturally there's always more waste to be found. Certainly enough to kick off a bidding war between political parties even outside the election cycle. It's like they're competing on who can fuck up government the most. And we vote for the bloody idiots.
The impression I get of government IT is that they tend to buy large software suites from the "usual" vendors and then spend more money employing the "usual" consultancies trying to get the things integrated and working. As the vendors and consultancies are there to make money rather than improve society, it's not surprising things go awry.
" they tend to buy large software suites from the "usual" vendors and then spend more money employing the "usual" consultancies trying to get the things integrated and working."
Nope, they're MADE to do things this way by UK Gov, because - as we're supposed to believe, despite there never having been a single shred of evidence to support this ideology - buying a Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) package and then (supposedly) lightly tweaking it, will ALWAYS be better, and cheaper than anything the Public Sector can deliver, simply BECAUSE the COTS software has come from the Private side.
Way back in the early '90s I was one of the poor bastards given the job of beating EDS' "Florida" system into something that would work for the UK Child Support Agency (CSA).
(Florida wasn't COTS per se but the principle's the same).
And we know how well that went...
If Whitehall can't get enough people with the right skills to carry out is plans efficiently, perhaps it needs new plans.
Universal Basic Income, for example - that would do away with a huge swathe of administration around income-related tax credits. Universal 3rd party car insurance funded from fuel duty - that would do away with all the administration related to uninsured drivers. Proper regional government to get some economies of scale rather than the inefficient duplication and competition of tiny local councils.
Unfortunately, Whitehall isn't allowed to make plans - it has to implement the brain-dead, ephemeral vanity schemes of the vain, brain-dead ephemeral politicians whose only response when their folly is exposed is to criticise the people who are following their very instructions.
As ministers feel being "efficient" is to retain only the tiniest handful of cheap unskilled civil servants making even the most trivial delivery a sourcing exercise even just to build a statement of work.
Roll on Brexit when they realise that whole government departments that ceased to be necessary and will need to be recreated as European directives were used to drive them. I would actually like my food to meet some minimum standards regardless of mythical levels of dissatisfaction with the directives...
There was a skills and capability agenda under John Suffolk which stared to be dismantled by Bill McCluggage in 2010 and which Liam Maxwell finally killed in 2012. A team dedicated to resolving IT skill shortages in Whitehall.
Then consider 2010 spend controls banned recruitment of consultants and contractors without ministerial approval (initially from Mad Frankie Maude, later delegated to departmental ministers).
Now Maude is gone ... this would appear to me to be a clear indicator that he iron grip he wielded on departmental spending in IT is loosening. Other symptoms - departments not complying with GDS edict, Liam Maxwell being sidelined, GDS directionless with no political support.
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