"We need to cut down on consultants!"
"Good idea, let's hold a consultation on how to do it..."
Public sector spending on consultants fell sharply last year, according to a report from the Management Consultancies Association (MCA). It says that in 2010 the public sector spent 15 per cent less on consultants than it had in the previous year – although the MCA declined to disclose the total, saying it was confidential to …
The problem is, that when you deskill the workforce, like HMRC have done by replacing all their highly trained tax inspectors with a couple of call centres and some scripts, when it doesn't work because you have made all the people who knew how things were meant to operate (and more importantly, why), redundant, then there is then little choice but to pay bucket loads of dosh to those same experts or to others as consultants.
Looks great in the short term though until someone finds out it is cheap but not working.
I'll take a wild stab at Building Schools for the Future.
Possibly (although I somehow doubt it) the last of the NuLabor juggernaut programmes that won't f**king die.
I hope some AC will drop a few hints on this.
Otherwise thumbs up. I think *anything* which weans government off it's con-sultancy dependence is a good idea.
Perhaps it's time governments (not just int the UK) realised managing *large* chunks of data *is* a core activity and should *not* be knocked out to smooth talking ex-PSB in a suit with a plausible line in complete b***ocks.