Businesses that do meet these criteria charge like wounded bulls. In part because they know that all the other businesses that the govt could turn to will also charge like wounded bulls.
I once knew someone who had to solicit 3 bids and document them to buy a $500 camera for local government. They weren't thinking "I am useless and craven", they were thinking "this is silly but I have to do it".
I was against it, but "you know, if they don't do it, they no longer give a warranty on the solution", type of bullshit. Yeah 60md of warranty? My client are a bunch of fools.
Like ONG, bribes and extracting public money is the first target.
This is an absurd statement that might as well come straight out of Yes Minister. Buying from PWC reflects badly on them already, let alone when their next scandal happens. Which is of course never far away [0].
I'm sure Fujitsu met similar "criteria" when selected for Horizon. How well that selection reflected on the procurement office..
Buying from PWC reflects badly on them with us, because we know tech. It does not reflect badly with other civil servants, because PWC is a highly-respected organisation.
It's very similar to "No-one got fired for buying from IBM", which was a cliche because it was true.
Strictly speaking its ISO 9001 but we do the same as you and call it ISO 9000. You forgot 27001 and 14001.
I've seen it happen time and again with startups, though. They have a great idea, perfect for a large business to use. They get a project manager or department manager excited about it, they even run a PoC successfully. And then they slap headfirst into the Procurement Wall and the whole project grinds to a halt. Three years between project approval and issuing a purchase order. And then 90 days between invoice and payment. Startups go bust waiting for these cogs to turn.
Quoted for truth. Well said.
Why accept the status que? How many working lives of tax revenue did this bs consume?
One of the many, many, arguments for not allowing organisations to get this big.
Follow the processes. Document everything. Make certain the winning bidder has all the relevant certificates and insurance covers in place before agreeing to anything.
Leaving the Civil Service was one of the best work decisions I ever took.
> If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business.
You don't think that spending £4.1 million on this garbage might reflect badly on someone?
For us techies who know the tech (or even the law, in this case) this is a disaster. But for the folks in those meetings this is what they understood to be the brief.
If enough of the public gets ahold of the story so that a politician has to get up on their hind legs and issue a statement, then harsh words might be had. But otherwise, this is business as usual.
Step 1: Come up with an incredibly easy to meet standard (because you don't want anybody abandoning the process because it's too much of a hassle) that sounds like a reasonable requirement on paper (to make it easy to pitch as a basic requirement of doing business). Say, "Have a plan for the things you do".
Step 2: Add one additional requirement to your standard: "Prioritize Vendors that meet this standard".
Step 3: Obscure the hell out of the standard, (to not make the grift too obvious) and stick it behind a paywall.
Step 4: Franchise out the (nigh-impossible to fail) "approval" process to 3rd parties, who pay you for the privilege.
Step 5: Your first few "standardized" companies put pressure on their vendors and customers to get certified, so they hire consultants, who in turn pay you, who tell them "Good job, you meet the standard. But do your vendors?".
Step 6: Watch as the cash floods in.
(Optional, Step 7): Once a bunch of major companies are certified, target governments to do your marketing push for you.
Where does all this talk of standards come from?
Want to use enterprise product XYZ?
Need to have at least X amount of certified employees to reach the basic layer, additional certifications for the next layers.
The kind of support tickets, documentation and trainings available depend on the certification levels, and by the way they have to be renewed every couple of years.
However it is how the ball rolls in certain industries, and rebeling against it won't win anything, better switch jobs for those anti-certifications.
I have been an MD for 25 years. ISO 9001 reg. since 2006. Its been a bit of a pain at times but it does concentrate the mind towards doing things right. We've never used consultants, we've always just read and followed the standards.
What is your experience?
PS During our last assessment, the assessor described a few recent AI written efforts they had come across. Laughable.
PPS I've been doing this for over 25 years and I think that a quality based approach to running a company is a good idea ... you?
> Labour taking free staff from scandal-hit consulting firms
> [...] The party has quietly accepted more than £230,000 worth of free staff from ‘big four’ accounting firms PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Ernst & Young (EY) since Keir Starmer took over as leader in 2020.
Still, I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the ruling party was gifted £230k of free services from PwC, then brought a static website from PwC for £4.1 million of taxpayer money.
One of the given reasons is because Burnham is currently mayor of Greater Manchester, and running a new election there would cost approx £4m(!!) which is a huge waste of taxpayer money.
I was surprised that they even gave this as a faux reason since it seems like the sort of money they would spend on replenishing the water coolers, or buying bic pens, or... building a static website!
eg.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/28/labour-debt-peter...
https://doctorsforthenhs.org.uk/the-truth-about-the-lies-tha...
etc
The fact that a huge amount of money is extracted from the UK government for no (or very little value) is a crying shame.
I know multiple people who work as consultants (hired via private agencies, paid for by Government) who have literally done nothing for six months plus.
They have no incentive to whistleblow, the agency employing them has no incentive to get rid of them as they take a cut, and then government department hiring them is non-the-wiser because they have no technical knowledge or understanding of what's being carried out.
It should be the scandal of the decade.
Why can't he just do both jobs? Boris did it iirc.
It is fairly innately political. No Prime Minister has ever polled as low as Starmer and come back from it, or so is being said in the press. Burnham might be a smart electoral move, but he's not a plaything of the Labour right, so they kept him out.
I have worked with many "big agency" developers and can tell you categorically that they are more often than not absolutely terrible at their jobs.
https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/001337-2025?or...
Scammers are winners.
It's frustrating, because these larger firms most always churn out subpar work and this mindset just keeps funding it so they don't improve.
Just the development would be expensive but if they also worked on scoping and framing the platform, aligning multiple stakeholders (yes, even just linking outside courses mean you might have to interact with other parts of government or providers) and defining the long term vision and plan, it can get expensive pretty quickly.
Doing anything with the government is a pain. It's even worse than working in a large company. You get paid very late. You have annoying contractual provisions. It makes everything very expensive.
Not so much of the "long term vision and plan", but plenty of aligning stakeholders, as well as discovering, researching, and managing third party resources - and then there's the requirement to run the service for a further 18 months.
£4m is enough to pay for about 15 consultants for 18 months at typical rates paid by the public sector. But since this is a standalone project, call it a dozen plus overheads. That feels roughly right as a finger-in-the-air estimate for a project of that sort of scope.
There is this thing that happens in USA where RFPs are issued in such a way only one vendor could pass the mark - does that happen in UK? Reckon PwC has connections to make that happen
(+ Some of the detail of the scoring matrix is not as transparent as we would like, but Innovate UK does take feedback and tries to improve it).
The tender is here [0], the approval process is usually pretty watertight. The contracts that go through this will have a paper trail. What you’ll likely find is that PWC has written a spec that meets the letter of the contract and they have delivered a site that meets the letter of their wording, which is what they’re good at. The fact that it didn’t actually solve the problem is inconsequential to PwC
[0] https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/021898-2024
You are mistaken. The fact it does not solve the problem is good for business, because follow up contracts to resolve any shortcomings will most likely also be awarded to PwC, since they are the only bidder to already have the in house expertise on this bespoke site...
£120k, double it for stupid amounts of testing, double it again for managers to tell the people doing the work "do the work". We're still only at £500k.
Gov.uk web team are supposed to be award winning. Why are we picking shitty slop-corps to do this work?
I've heard of large SIs charging millions for discovery work, only for the report to say the budget is not enough to build the project.
Never mind the standards orgs tendering needs to meet (ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus). It's not for the faint-hearted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#:~:text=estimat...
and that's before knowing about the £4M
But I guess donating another £4MM to PwC is more sensible.
I know this is just the author deflecting the clichéd argument, but I hate that argument. The pennies do matter, otherwise the argument is made ad infinitum and you end up with a financially inept government running up a £200bn deficit.
These small websites should never be awarded to the mega-consultancies. Even if you paid the full £4m to a small webdev shop who'd feel like they'd hit the lottery I bet we'd get a better result and do more for the economy.
Fun project to be on. We played “descope” bingo… but everyone won all the time.
I started off from the press release on GOV.UK (as linked in OP and which is a paragon of virtue in web design) and followed the "Free AI foundations training" link and it all went south rather rapidly.
Its bold, brash and horrible. It does look like a set of links and its not immediately obvious where you start or what to do with it.
There are a few things that might be hyperlinks but the large weird rounded cornered sort of press me perhaps if you dare but I'm a bit flat and might kick your dog thing that might be a control or not but I'm purple and have an arrow ... ooh go on ... click me. Clicking around that area does move on to the next step which is just as obtuse.
I do hope that clears things up!
A reminder the UKs Test and Trace apparently cost £29.3 billion of the £37bn allocated. Disgusting waste of money.
But at least Keir and the government will have cushy jobs to go to after they leave government.
https://fullfact.org/health/NHS-test-and-trace-app-37-billio...
"The NAO said that of the approximately £13.5 billion spent on the NHS Test and Trace programme in 2020/21, £35 million was spent on the app.
The vast majority of the spending in that year was accounted for by testing (£10.4 billion)."
I still think this is far higher than comparable countries and seems like a rip off. Any of the figures are extremely wasteful IMO. I wasn’t trying to suggest the app cost billions.
Test and trace is just the name of the UK programme (as used by fullfact and the NAO) so I’m not sure why you’re attempting to correct me on the naming.
Feels so timely. May we all aspire to such a simple goal.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology...
All other discussion is just noise.
If you accept the idea that it's OK for the state to spend 50% of the economy, on things for you or your various self-congratulatory moral-high-horse programs, this is actually where the money will get pissed away to.
It's all carefully avoiding noticing that socialism is theft because maybe you might get a sniff of the loot.
Here's what Asmongold would say. Coercion and incentivisation work. Charge everyone involved at gov.uk and Pwc with fraud, from the decision makers top to the lower decks doing the actual work. Enact immediate severe and drastic punishment, put them in a box for ten years and let them work off their debt to society by turning big rocks into little rocks or something. If the law is a hindrance, just change the law. It's not a real thing, it's made up, a shared idea in people's mind. If the state officials do not want to enact the will of the people, then use the 2nd box of liberty to replace them with those who do want. Anyone thinking about enriching oneself by following example of the offenders should become deathly afraid to do so. Defrauding the taxpayer would stop being a widespread problem over night.
If any of this causes a revulsion of abhorrence in your mind, then discharge yourself of social programming and put this into perspective. This is the reasonable and fair approach. They receive grace and get to keep their life. In other places and times of the world, they would simply beheaded and that would be the end of it.
If anyone reading this just wants to down-vote out of disagreement in the typical fashion of left-extremist knee-jerkers, then be advised that this bad faith acting changes no one's opinion, you're just feeding into making HN an echo chamber for radicals and you put yourself automatically on the wrong side of history for anyone to see. Try your hand not being a dismal coward by actually engaging in discussion.
This will have as much effect as a gnat’s fart.
