The cost of consultancy to Government is, as most will undoubtedly guess, scarily high. Usually when figures are released they are very much grand totals of spending on consultants, and rarely do you get to see the breakdown of the fees paid out.
For example, spending on consultants in last financial year by the separate parts which now make up the Ministry of Justice was a cool £8,936,362. However this total figure was not released, I added it up from its constituent parts, some which are quite amusing.
The National Offender Management Service spent £8000 on an "analysis of alcohol needs of newly sentenced offenders". Why they didn't realise that "you can't have any" is the most obvious answer I do not know. They spent £45,000 on a "Diversity Consultant" for their Independent Monitoring Board as well. Which is nice.
My personal favourite from NOMS though was the £60,000 paid to KPMG for a consultant to carry out a "Headcount Reduction Project". There is something uniquely amusing about employing someone to analyse how to employ less people, isn't there?
Meanwhile, and just as throwaway, I was a little bemused to discover that the former DCA spent approximately £360,000 (£1.08m over three years) with IPSOS Mori on a "customer user survey" for HM Court Services. Who's the "customer"? The accused? Or the victim? Or perhaps it was just about whether people were happy with the vending machines?
2 comments:
"Why they did the when 'you can't have any' is the most obvious answer I do not know."
My guess is that they didn't especially like the idea of causing them to die from alcohol withdrawal, which is a genuine risk in very, very alcoholic alcoholics, who I suspect make up a higher proportion of prisoners than of the population as a whole.
"My personal favourite from NOMS though was the £60,000 paid to KPMG for a consultant to carry out a 'Headcount Reduction Project'."
This is hardly unusual, in government or in the private sector - the idea is that the consultant draws up objective criteria that ensure the right people (rather than, say, the people who the boss perceives as a threat because they're cleverer than him) get reduced.
John B
1: I'm surprised you managed to understand my abortion of a typo. Must proof read my shit more often. Sadly though, I don't care about the other stuff.
2: I didn't say it was unusual. I said it was amusing because of the irony.
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