Government departments and agencies are duplicating the work they order from consultants, a scrutiny by the unit found. They are appointing as project managers civil servants who are too inexperienced, too busy or who change jobs too often. Only limited attempts are made to assess the benefits consultants bring or their value for money.
Over four years, departments and agencies could specifically identify only pounds 50m of savings – pounds 12.2m a year – from the use of external consultants on whom they jointly spent pounds 560m in 1992-93. That was because information about the use of consultants within government is often inaccessible; it is not possible to track spending and savings consistently across government; and consultants’ contributions may be only part of a larger process. Even when the outcome is quantifiable, there may be no ready way of apportioning consultants’ particular contributions to a new trunk road, new weapons system, more competitive British firms, or the big gains from privatisations or competitive tendering, for example.’All one can really say with confidence is that external consultancy advice has been an important element in securing substantial quantifiable benefits for government, and that these benefits have been many times greater than the cost of the consultancy itself,’ the report says.None the less, ’substantial improvements’ should be made in the way consultants are used.

‘We found few attempts to look first at what other departments and agencies have done, or to see if there were other, cheaper ways of tackling the problem.’ Making 34 recommendations to improve performance, including a central library of previous projects and a ‘brokerage’ service to identify the most appropriate consultants, the efficiency unit said consultants should be seen as a costly resource to be used ‘only on matters of real importance to the organisation’.Recommendations to improve the way consultancy contracts are agreed and handled would cost about pounds 22m a year but that should produce savings of pounds 65m, chiefly in consultancy fees – producing a net saving over three years of nearly pounds 130m. That did not include benefits from ‘more relevant, more sharply focused and better-managed consultancy work, with results more systematically implemented’. If that produced only a 0.1 per cent efficiency gain across government, savings would total another pounds 164m a year.David Hunt, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said departments would be asked to draw up action plans based on the scrutiny’s recommendations. Michael Meacher, his Labour opposite number, said the report showed half a billion pounds had been spent for ‘pitiful’ savings.The Government’s Use of External Consultants; HMSO; pounds 10.. THE Government has paid out nearly pounds 20m to consultants for advice on privatising British Rail, Frank Dobson, Labour’s transport spokesman, said, writes Nicholas Timmins.

Linklaters and Paines, the City solicitors, have alone been paid pounds 5.6m – more than the cost of the 5.7 per cent pay offer which would have settled the signal staff’s strike, Mr Dobson said.
‘At a time when the Government says the country can’t afford to reward signalling staff for their remarkable improvements in productivity, they can find endless millions of pounds to squander on rail privatisation,’ Mr Dobson said ‘It just shows. the only train (the Government) really cares about is the gravy train – rich contracts given to City consultants.’Sums paid out so far include pounds 3.3m for accounting services; pounds 2m on merchant banking; and pounds 2.5m for advice on how private rail companies should be given access to the track and charged for it. The outcome of that work, however, ‘was so unsatisfactory that the Rail Regulator has commissioned new studies’.. THE television soap Emmerdale was yesterday censured again over excessive violence. The Broadcasting Standards Council said it was upholding complaints from six viewers about scenes in May showing an armed robbery.
The decision followed criticism of the ITV soap two weeks ago by the industry’s regulator, the Independent Television Commission.The ITC said it shared the concern of viewers about ‘the change in Emmerdale towards a tougher and more violent style’.Scenes criticised by the BSC showed masked raiders storming a post office and a street shoot-out.The BSC said the level of violence ‘exceeded limits appropriate’ for a serial transmitted for a family audience.. If you typed in a URL, please make sure you have typed it correctly.

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