Consultancy scam - politicians giving contracts to their friends - NHS suffering
"Consultancies claim to offer expertise, but often it’s a confidence trick. The victim? Taxpayers.
The United Kingdom is today the world’s second-largest consultancy market and the country has outsourced a significant portion of public services to consultancy firms.
In 2016, the UK public sector awarded consulting contracts worth 700 million pounds. The value of these contracts increased to 2.6 billion pounds by 2022. This includes 83 million pounds in National Health Service (NHS) contracts, which is equivalent to the cost of training more than 1,600 new nurses.
Consultants continue to gouge the NHS’s coffers, claiming daily rates of 3,000 pounds - ironically, to help the health service improve how it tracks expenses on private companies. The NHS also paid top consultancy executives an annual salary higher than that of its own CEO – this, while the UK government claims it does not have money to give doctors and nurses a meaningful pay rise.
The running joke is that no one really knows what consultants do. Yet they are slick, have an air of reckless confidence, use generic terms like “streamline” and “synergy”.
In their book The Big Con, economists Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington rightly point out that consultancies perform a “confidence trick” ... they “create an impression of value” that allows them to demand compensation that far exceeds the actual value of knowledge they bring to the table."
Consultancy scam - politicians giving contracts to their friends - NHS suffering
ReplyDelete"Consultancies claim to offer expertise, but often it’s a confidence trick. The victim? Taxpayers.
The United Kingdom is today the world’s second-largest consultancy market and the country has outsourced a significant portion of public services to consultancy firms.
In 2016, the UK public sector awarded consulting contracts worth 700 million pounds. The value of these contracts increased to 2.6 billion pounds by 2022. This includes 83 million pounds in National Health Service (NHS) contracts, which is equivalent to the cost of training more than 1,600 new nurses.
Consultants continue to gouge the NHS’s coffers, claiming daily rates of 3,000 pounds - ironically, to help the health service improve how it tracks expenses on private companies. The NHS also paid top consultancy executives an annual salary higher than that of its own CEO – this, while the UK government claims it does not have money to give doctors and nurses a meaningful pay rise.
The running joke is that no one really knows what consultants do. Yet they are slick, have an air of reckless confidence, use generic terms like “streamline” and “synergy”.
In their book The Big Con, economists Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington rightly point out that consultancies perform a “confidence trick” ... they “create an impression of value” that allows them to demand compensation that far exceeds the actual value of knowledge they bring to the table."
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/6/1/why-governments-love-private-consultants-and-their-billables