There is chaos everywhere, from Customs and Excise to the Child Support Agency, from the Inland Revenue to the Department of Work and Pensions. During Prime Minister’s Questions last month Tony Blair was invited to cite ‘any major Government IT project that has been delivered on budget or on time’. He came up with the passport system. The fact that this was the best example the Prime Minister could find shows the awesome scale of the problem. The passport system was neither on time nor on budget. In fact it was scandalously delayed — with massive backlogs during the summer of 1999 — and well over budget. It was, however, nowhere near as bad as the calamitous new ‘connecting for health’ IT system for the health service. It now looks likely that the entire scheme, budgeted at a staggering £30 billion and rising, may turn out to be useless.
The authors show that part of the problem is accountability. Consultants are not government ministers. Hardly anyone knows who they are. Only very occasionally — for instance when Rod Aldridge, chairman of IT consultancy Capita, resigned after it emerged he had loaned the Labour party £1 million — does a management consultant float into the public eye. Very often they are not even responsible to ministers but to quangos and other non-departmental bodies. Once the money has been squandered the Public Administration Committee mournfully chronicles the waste, but no minister or even government official seems ever to have been held to account.
Another problem is conflict of interest. John Birt was allowed to keep his £100,000 retainer from McKinseys after moving into Downing Street as a key adviser. For years ministers relied on a report from the now disgraced firm Arthur Andersen to demonstrate that its Private Finance Initiative was cost-effective and efficient, apparently unperturbed by the fact that Andersen had a vested interest in reaching this conclusion because it hoped to generate substantial fee income from the PFI.
There are constant moves between the consultancy sector and vica versa. Former Accenture accountant Ian Watmore was appointed head of Tony Blair’s Delivery Unit at the end of last year, while ex-McKinsey partner David Bennett runs the No. 10 Policy Unit. To a staggering extent, consultants now run Whitehall. They set their own job descriptions and produce the reports that justify what they do.
It is mysterious that all the serial bungling and light-hearted wastage of tens of billions of taxpayers’ money have not caused any real public outcry. An important reason for this is the financial illiteracy of the political journalists whose job it is to bring this kind of government failing to national attention. We lack the expertise and a flair for figures which are required to understand the problem. The authors of this book possess both. David Craig is a management consultant who now prefers to expose the tricks of his old profession. Richard Brooks is a former tax inspector who writes for Private Eye.
It is greatly to be regretted that they have not provided an index. The authors sometimes write in such a breezy fashion — for instance loosely accusing New Labour of ‘helping George Bush try to start World War Three’ — that they risk undermining their authority. But these are relatively minor points. David Craig and Richard Brooks have performed an immense public service, and this horrifying book deserves a wide readership.
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