Have you wondered why City workers and others in the financial services sector are enjoying such huge annual bonuses this Christmas? Well, it seems they are doing so courtesy of the hard-pressed tax-payer.
Today’s Times reports the first independent breakdown of the costs to the public sector of hiring external consultants, published by the National Audit Office. It discovered a huge recent increase in such forms of expenditure: in the last three years, it rose by a third from £2 billion to £3 billion.
The NAO claims nearly all of this increase could have been avoided had the public sector made greater use of in-house tendering and pooled information about the cost-effectiveness of different private firms.
Although difficult to judge effectiveness, because, astonishingly, the public sector does not undertake performance reviews of them or collect much data on them, the NAO established private firms are four times as costly as in-house tenders.
Among the prime culprits responsible for the huge increase in the amount apparently squandered in this way is, predictably, the NHS which now spends twenty times what it did on them only three years ago. Some of the private consultancies whom the NHS has hired are IT specialists. Others, apparently, are financial consultancies whom NHS hospitals have hired, so the Times reports without a trace of irony, to reduce the half billion deficit they have run up!
Elsewhere it reports that, ostensibly to reduce costs, the government is seeking to restrict how much information in future government departments will be forced to disclose under the terms of its Freedom of Information Act. Campaigners for disclosure estimate annual savings will only be in the region of a mere £12 million, a small price to pay, they claim, for such access as is currently available.
Among such wonderful gems that FOI requests have unearthed to date are that the Tate paid £600,000 for artwork of one of its own trustees, and that seven Whitehall departments have made no redundancies despite Treasury calls for 84,000 jobs there to be shed by April 2008.
Dear, oh, bloody, dear! What a shambles the present government has turned out to be.
Comments (1)
Your headline should have said: "Some parts of the private sector have never had it so good - courtesy of public sector inefficiency".
Try working in the parts of the prvate sector that don't supply the public sectore and which have to compete internationally. They've never had it so bad.
Posted by HJHJ | December 16, 2006 3:11 PM
Posted on December 16, 2006 15:11