Well worth reading this article by Nick Cohen in today’s Observer about ‘management consultants’.

Here are three tales of my own personal experiences. Each a different organisation. Each of these consultancies was paid large sums of money:

1. A set of reports delivered which kept referencing a different organisation to the one I worked for. The consultancy concerned had simply re-cycled some reports they had previously written for someone else. In all, these reports cost a local authority one million pounds. Nothing was ever delivered.

2. While working on an egovernment ‘national programme’ I submitted my reports for ‘quality review’. They came back containing mistakes and typos that had not been there in the first place and the formatting and structure of the reports had all be wrecked. The ‘consultancy’ was paid around £10k and I was told that there could be no complaints because ‘they were partners in the project’.

3. While doing quality reviews on another project I was sent three reports which were nothing but powerpoint presentations which had been copied and pasted (not very successfully) into the project templates. Again told ‘can’t complain because they are partners’. This organisation was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds during this project.

So to add to Nick Cohen’s piece; it’s not just the amount these consultancies cost, the quality of a lot of what they deliver is p*ss poor.

The current estimate is that management and IT consultants are costing the government (well, actually us the taxpayer) around £7 billion a year.

The amount of debt in the NHS? Around £500 million.

We read in the same edition of today’s Observer that there are to be huge cuts to the provision of pensioners, some of the most vulnerable sections of society. The people who built the NHS in the first place or sweated blood guts and tears through two world wars.

It’s some government we have that can cut services to pensions while it continues to increase the astronomical payments to management consultancies.

Anyone who believes for a nano-second that Gordon Brown is somehow financial prudent should ponder and dismay.