A Consultant Responds

The UK government spends nearly £2bn a year on external consultants, often without adequately measuring value for money, a committee of MPs has said.

Whitehall spent £1.8bn of the public sector's £2.8bn bill for 2005-6, a 33% rise in three years, the report said. Public Accounts Committee chairman Edward Leigh said tighter controls could save £500m a year.

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A Consultant Responds

all – apols if you think i am needlessly modularising neurosis here but i feel i really must give you the heads-up on the quantitatively significant risk we are being rumbled. yes i know how difficult it is to underestimate the naivety of any client and when the client is whitehall it ought to be impossible to expect any insight whatsoever. but those do-gooders on the public accounts committee may not be quite the port-brained has-beens we’d assumed. they go way beyond descoping the challenges we face, skills-wise, in the bath-running department. besides, anyone who can’t componetize that disincent has no right to call themselves a management consultant. it’s the alarming enthusiasm for pushing the performance-related envelope that’s worrying me. gadzooks indeed. it looks like they might take the helicopter view of our 360-degree searches for innovative, right-sized, human resource-based, time-sheet completion programmes. sure, there is no harm if some end-users consciously keep us in chinos because we divert attention away from internal politicking. but how can we expect to find traction in the revenue field if it becomes common knowledge that the best thing we ever do is get bone-headed functionaries to talk to one another? we surely need to go live on some c-level bacon-smelling, asap. what say you we suggest a bottom-up repurposing of the delivery metrics with a view to ensuring soup-to-nuts focus on real-time achievement in the developing, understanding and influencing of mission critical functions in the customer/citizen support matrix? it will take them until the next reshuffle to work out the dismal meaninglessness of it all. it might get us to the next PAC report. vbest.