If the opinions of some recent Civil Service World interviewees are anything to go by, then yes.

 

Patricia Greer of the National School of Government told the newspaper that government was better off learning from itself rather than buying in management expertise from outside. She pointed out that consultancies were in it for the money: they would sell the same idea to several departments, when departments could be passing the information on themselves.

 

Last year, I heard a senior Home Office civil servant describe exactly this phenomenon: he had received a letter from a consultancy offering him a particular service which, he knew, was something that had been developed while the firm was working with another department. He was not impressed, and was not going to take them up on their offer.

 

More recently, a senior official at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said he hoped that a new staffing system will help them identify skill shortages, such as programme and project management (PPM), so that they could invest in staff instead of employing consultants.

 

The cost of consultants was examined by the National Audit Office (NAO) three years ago. In 2005-06, the resulting report said, central government had spent £1.8bn on consultants – largely on IT and PPM advice.

 

Auditors specifically warned that departments, for the most part, did not: assess whether internal resources could have been used; collect adequate information and performance data on the consultants they used; engage with firms in order to understand how they worked; or attempt to transfer the skills of consultants to internal staff.

 

To address these concerns, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) launched its Consultancy Value Programme (CVP) and, in March this year, it repeated the NAO’s survey of 16 departments’ spend on consultants. It found that, in 2007-08, expenditure had dropped by 31 per cent.

 

Now that departments have CVP to focus on, you would expect the most recent figures to show a further drop. But they don’t.

 

While it is not always possible to square the figures in departmental accounts for 2008-09 (due to varying definitions of consultancy, for example, see table for figures and further explanation), you can do so for eight of them - and that comparison shows there has been a 36 per cent increase in spending on consultants.

 

Why the increase? The biggest rise is at the Home Office – an increase of 122 per cent, from £96m to £213m – which is attributed in the annual report to major programmes in “security and counter terrorism and identity management”. Take the Home Office out of the equation and the increase is just eight per cent – but it is still an increase, not the decrease the OGC would like to see. And only three of the departments we looked at have managed to reduce spending.

 

The will may be there, but it is not yet showing up in the accounts.

The government's drive to push down the consultancy bill will continue, though, and it will be given the added impetus of tighter spending plans in future years and cuts to major programmes that may, in the past, have required external expertise – the Conservatives have sworn to abandon projects such as Contact Point and ID cards; both big contributors to the bill.



The OGC intends to publish its own figures for 2008-09, using the same methodology as in previous years. They will provide a much more reliable comparison than the indications produced by my research. I for one will be eagerly awaiting their arrival.