What do they all do?

I have always been sceptical about the usefulness of consultants to both business and government. The nail in the coffin was when William Hague got a job as a “business consultant” at, I think, Bains, just after graduating with a degree in PPE.

What advice and insight a recent graduate in a completely unrelated subject has to bring to a bank or manufacturing company it is hard to think of. But I bet the company charged a fortune for his “expertise”.

But for some reason I was not surprised to hear that the last government increased spending on consultants at the Home Office tenfold.

After all if you think the Civil Service is useless and the private sector brilliant this would be likely to happen, but tenfold?

Apparently a lot of it was spent on trying to stop asylum seekers coming to the UK, but that is the sort of stuff that the Home Office, Police, and Border Force have dozens of experts on, really experienced and well trained experts. Maybe the real reason is that austerity and the purge of staff it involved at all those agencies meant that they had lost the capacity and the experience necessary to do their jobs properly.

It would be really interesting to see how much of this money on consultants was actually spent hiring back staff who had left the Civil Service with large payoffs and then were desperately needed back.

Anyhow Labour has sworn to drastically cut back on the number of consultants and the money spent on them, but that probably means rebuilding the capacity of the Civil Service. not a quick or cheap solution.

But probably a saving in the long run, good governance doesn’t come cheap but investing in it is worthwhile.

Jonty’s Jottings

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.

By Jonty Bloom Media