Wednesday, October 07, 2020
Consultants cash in on Brexit
Yet more falsehoods from the 2016 referendum have been laid to rest this morning, namely that leaving the EU will be painless and save us money, with this report in the Guardian that the government’s reliance on management consultants has led to spending with the eight top firms rising by 45% to more than £450m in three years.
They say that Deloitte, the professional services firm, was the biggest winner, earning fees of £147m from public funds in 2019-20, compared with £40m two years earlier, amid a bonanza related in large part to Brexit. The Home Office had the biggest increase in consultancy spending over three years, jumping 788% to £57m as the department dealt with security, immigration and border preparations for leaving the EU:
The results of the analysis of more than 11,000 government invoices came on Tuesday as Boris Johnson promoted the private sector, saying “free enterprise” must lead the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
In his speech to Conservative party conference, the prime minister sounded a warning about the extent of state intervention on schemes such as furlough and said: “There comes a moment when the state must stand back and let the private sector get on with it. We must not draw the wrong economic conclusion from this crisis.”
However, last week the minister in charge of curbing Whitehall spending, Theodore Agnew, wrote a letter to senior civil servants saying the civil service had become “infantilised” by an “unacceptable” reliance on expensive management consultants.
While 1% of civil servants are paid more than £80,000 a year, day rates for management consultants working in the public sector range from about £1,000 for junior consultants to about £3,500 for partners.
So now we know.
They say that Deloitte, the professional services firm, was the biggest winner, earning fees of £147m from public funds in 2019-20, compared with £40m two years earlier, amid a bonanza related in large part to Brexit. The Home Office had the biggest increase in consultancy spending over three years, jumping 788% to £57m as the department dealt with security, immigration and border preparations for leaving the EU:
The results of the analysis of more than 11,000 government invoices came on Tuesday as Boris Johnson promoted the private sector, saying “free enterprise” must lead the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
In his speech to Conservative party conference, the prime minister sounded a warning about the extent of state intervention on schemes such as furlough and said: “There comes a moment when the state must stand back and let the private sector get on with it. We must not draw the wrong economic conclusion from this crisis.”
However, last week the minister in charge of curbing Whitehall spending, Theodore Agnew, wrote a letter to senior civil servants saying the civil service had become “infantilised” by an “unacceptable” reliance on expensive management consultants.
While 1% of civil servants are paid more than £80,000 a year, day rates for management consultants working in the public sector range from about £1,000 for junior consultants to about £3,500 for partners.
So now we know.
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nothing new there Peter other than the sheer scale of the spend. I suspect that while Civil Servants may be to "blame" for some of these spend decisions much of it is driven by the inability of politicians to accept the advice given unless it is backed by a second opinion. The tag "infantile" should therefore be attached to the Ministers and other decision makers who can't even recognise a situation where their watch is taken from them to tell the time, and not handed back ! £1000 per day for some wet inexperienced punk to spout pre-scripted garbage is a disgrace, but this is a world where emptying government funds into private coffers is considered good for the country regardless of absence of visible or quantifiable benefit.
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