Public sector consultants

I’ve been reading a deeply disconcerting book, bluntly entitled ‘Plundering the Public Sector‘, which sets out to tell the citizens how New Labour is letting consultants run off with £70 billion of our money. This profligacy is part of the general assumption by this woefully incompetent Government that private industry runs things better than the public sector, that the profit motive is the greatest guarantee of efficiency, and that if private industry employs consultants to help its decisions and their execution, then they must be a much better and more reliable solution than trusting civil servants.

To quote authors David Craig and Richard Brooks, ‘Perhaps the fatal mistake that New Labour made when talking to consultants was to assume they were talking to experts in finance, organisational effectiveness, IT systems, performance management, internal markets and so on’. That was one of the most naive errors ever made by any government. As the authors explain, ‘They were not talking to experts, they were talking to people with warm bodies to sell’. The public sector represented a huge honey pot into which consultants could dip their hands and go on licking their fingers, irrespective of the success or failure of their work.

What the politicians should have realised is that, ‘asking a consultant if you should change your organisation structure or put in a new computer system is like asking a hungry Great White Shark whether the water is warm and you should go in for a swim’. Craig and Brooks analyse how Government reacted when consultancy generated, not economies and efficiency, but over-spending and failure. ‘New Labour started manipulating the numbers to produce “Good News”, as it found that creating the impression of progress…was easier, faster and more enticing than the much more difficult and longer process of making real changes’.

The Ministry of Defence thus produced an annual report claiming (unbelievably) that ‘The MoD makes the best possible use of available resources’. It claimed that ‘the average in-year programme slippage for major projects was 2.4 months overall for newer projects, and 2.8 months for older projects’. And costs rose merely 2.7% measured against approval levels, and 3.1% compared to estimated project costs at the beginning of the year. When the National Audit Office looked at the figures, however, it found a £5.9 billion, 10% increase in costs and further delays over the previous 24 months of an average 10 months per project on the 20 biggest defence contracts.

I could go on quoting horrors from this alarming investigation ad lib, but what is the underlying issue? The Government, it appears, has no true responsibility; that is, there is nobody who can hold it to account, not just in one-off investigations, but in systematic review and report. In any event, the politicians are more interested in headlines than in true efficiency. This produces a trickle down of incompetence throughout the system.

If Government mandates a new, high-profile target which is deeply counter-productive, it creates managers who (like itself) fiddle the figures and exaggerate the successes, simply to keep their jobs. Of course, consultants should themselves be expert at spotting such obvious guarantees of failure. But since there is nobody to invigilate and direct their work, either, they become accessories to the murder of the public good. It’s a horrible situation, and one which Craig and Brooks are fully justified in assailing.

Their book is published by Constable at £9.99. Any sensible government would insist on making it compulsory reading for all ministers and senior civil servants. Fat chance.