| | By Mick James
I seem to remember
winding up last year
with a hope for more
balanced reporting on
consultancy. Should it
really have come as a
surprise then to find
the first
wrongly-headlined piece
about consultancy
appearing in The Times
on 2nd January.
"Whitehall job cuts body
needs more staff – to
cut jobs". The piece
turns on the apparently
self-evident absurdity
of the Office of
Government Commerce
(OGC), which is charged
with finding nearly
£25bn worth of savings
(the "Gershon cuts") by
2008, spending £9.2m on
consultants. That's a
bargain I'd take anyway,
but it's apparently not
good enough for George
Osborne, the Tory Shadow
Chancellor, who accuses
the OGC of "a classic
case of the pot calling
the kettle black"
because "its own
consultancy bills are
soaring". Presumably
he'd also have a go at a
headline like:
"Tooth-pulling body
needs more dentists — to
pull teeth."
But that's not what
I'm worried about here,
not even the bloke from
the Civil Service union
complaining about
"faceless consultants
lining their pockets". | |
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| | logistics, cheaper
procurement, happier
customers, more
productive staff. If
this requires
consultancy it's quite
properly tied up in the
overall cost of the
projects and scattered
across a dozen different
budgets. Within the
project itself it's
perfectly proper to ask
if the consultancy
element was well-spent.
But just taking the
consultancy spending out
of all these vastly
differing projects and
aggregating it together
is a pointless academic
exercise. Worse, it
lumps together the good
and the bad projects,
the money well and badly
spent—and considers it
all to be the same. It’s
a bit like asking
someone how much they
spend on gambling and
not taking into account
their winnings. Even
worse, this entirely
notional sum then
becomes a target for
"savings" — as if
consultancy was an
expense you could just
cut down on, like
smoking, or turning the
heating down a few
degrees. And so, last
election, Osborne's
party found themselves
promising to make the
Gershon savings, and
more, and also slash the
"consultancy bill"?
Well, I'd like to have | |
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| | seen them try.
You can see why the
Civil Service unions are
keen to drive the
consultants out of
government. They rightly
fear that jobs are at
risk. And, it has to be
said, the public service
has shown itself to be
well up to the task of
achieving the Gershon
savings without losing
any staff at all.
One council,
apparently, discovered
that volunteers had
worked for nothing to
clean up a park, and
promptly announced a
£4,000 saving. Other
"savings" towards the
target have come from
"more productive use of
time". I can see how
that might work. "I'm
working practically
flat out trying to
identify these savings;
in fact I'm probably
working twice as hard
as I did before. So if
my salary's £40,000, we
could say that's a
saving of £20,000. Or
maybe that should be
£40,000, since there's
now effectively two of
me. Tell you what we'll
split the difference and
put it down as £30,000 —
I'm sure we can find
something to spend the
other ten grand on."
Now consultants do a
lot of things, but they
will rarely leave the
status quo intact.
Unlike many in the | |
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| | public sector,
consultants don't fear
change because they
don't see it as a zero
sum game. The union guy
in the piece is worried
about his members facing
"the axe" (if only).
Surely the prospect of,
for example, the
projected £3bn savings
on procurement alone
would make some of his
members jobs more, not
less secure?
I do worry, it has to
be said, about the level
of public spending on
consultancy. Not because
of fat cat consultants
lining their pockets
(presumably to fund face
grafts). Rather I’m
concerned that political
and union opposition,
based on a
misunderstanding of what
consultancy is and can
do, ultimately stymies
its effectiveness.
Bizarrely, this
hostility is what
creates the apparently
endless demand for
consultancy - if you
only let your builders
paper over the cracks
they'll have to keep
coming back. Even more
bizarrely, consultants
are quite prepared to
kill this sort of golden
goose. Isn't it time
they were given the
chance?
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