The extent of government's use of consultants was exposed in a multi page written answer (No 13) to a question from Speaker Rodan in January's Tynwald.
Almost £12 million expenditure was declared in employing over 80 of them, many from off-Island.
One startling fact is that the Chief secretary's Office and DED together spends £450,000 per annum on PR consultants, Lanson Communications.
However this may not be the complete overall picture, as the definition of consultant may well have been narrowly interpreted.
For example it was revealed only a month ago that Tri-X Childcare Limited (a UK company), is contracted until the end of March,by the Department of Social Care, on behalf of the Safeguarding Children Board, at a cost of £112.000. Yet there is no mention of this at all in the answer.
Chief Minister Allan Bell in the earlier Q& A session had spoken at length about the need to change the culture within government.
A good starting point may well be to reduce the dependency on consultants, after all government already employs about 2150 civil servants.
| File | File size | Downloads |
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 ConsultantsAnswerTynwald170112.pdf | 425 Kb | 1961 |
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Comments
I expect it is the same here on a smaller scale.
What about the retired senior officers who upon retirement, draw their pension and get taken back on as 'consultants' ?
I'll give you one example, Richard Senior retired as director of housing in the old DoLGE , Debbie Reeve was appointed as Director of Housing, she has been since she started 'shadowed' by Senior who was taken on as a 'consultant' this has been going on for some 3 years plus.
I'm sure there are other examples.
On page 3 it outlines their extremely narrow interpretation of consultancy:
1. excludes the provision of non-project work, ie daily run of the mill work performed by outside companies or individuals. WHY?
2. excludes work where responsibility for the final outcome lies with the client. Now, I'd like to thing that the client - government - takes responsibility for anything that they have chosen to outsource to external companies! Again, WHY?
This is utter rubbish. For example:
ISD are stated to not have used any consultancy.
Regular work being carried out for them by the likes of Griffiths Waite, Rocela, Touchstone, Kainos, PDMS and Tribal are excluded from the list.
Misleading? You bet!
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