(FTFY)
In my own experience consulting with factory owners—advising them on hardware choices like Lumens versus Mitsubishi—I see the physical reality. The idea of absorbing a client's database into an ontology and hooking it up to an LLM sounds great in theory. However, considering the extreme fragmentation of equipment standards and data representations across different sites, I seriously question if this is a sustainable business model.
Sure, initially it’s just dispatch programming. But how can they possibly absorb all these disparate, chaotic field environments into a single platform asset? Even within a single factory, different assembly lines use entirely different equipment, often from completely different manufacturers.
The idea of interpreting every piece of equipment's specific protocol, reverse-engineering the DB schemas, standardizing the terminology, and modeling the entire approval flow seems practically impossible. Is this actually achievable? Take PLCs, for example: even if they share a standard communication protocol, the ladder logic itself is completely incompatible across different brands
Thinking about it in reverse, Palantir might have absolutely no intention of solving this fragmentation problem themselves. Their survival strategy might be to dictate the core tech stack of the end-point B2C clients, creating a structure that essentially incentivizes specific B2B vendors to fall in line. Ultimately, what makes Palantir so dangerous is the high likelihood that they will simply shift the massive cost of standardization onto those B2B subcontractors
I would never trust an openly MAGA company.
As long as the utterly unreliable, unstable, incompetent and unwise leadership in the US threatens to annex EU territory, every step should be taken to lessen our reliance on US defence equipment in any shape or form.
You don't seem to realise how close to war we already came. If Iran didn't weaken the US ambitions, Cuba, Panama and Greenland would have been next on the list.
Luckily, some people in the US start to realise how stupid they now look.
Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental.
See also senior staff at NHS England (or Digitial? can't remember) handing massive NHS compute contracts to AWS, and then leaving the civil service to become... an AWS employee.
It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy.
As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.
Then we get into actually building and owning tech. Look at the history of GDS - they were empowered to pay half decent salaries and build and own things, but then had budgets slashed and programs cut. Why? Because we can "just buy it". Yes, you won't own the IP, it'll cost 4x as much, it'll take 3x-5x longer, but at least you won't have "inefficient civil service bloat" to have to manage.
This all started in the 1980s, and there are signs of it swinging back. I was at one department last year where they were telling me they're thinking about hiring actual engineers and embedding some devops stuff internally - absolutely jaw-droopingly revolutionary. Genuinely.
Ding ding ding. This is all driven by ideological mistrust of the public sector, as you've pointed out and people are even defending in the comments.
Similar stuff with other ministries. Interior ministry has their own it department, where they develop and maintain the population registry, criminal registries, and stuff that requires a security clearance
Specifically, he bemoaned how well-intentioned anti-corruption measures meant that if they wanted to lean on a startup, it was practically impossible to do so. The risk that had been mitigated was that of someone like him giving money to his family or friends – which is an understandable risk to try to mitigate! But the net effect of that was that IBM got all the contracts at a wildly higher cost and with no ability to lean on small business.
I later worked at the Department of Health during the Blair-era restructuring, when management layers multiplied, Trust structures became increasingly fragmented, and PFI debt created long-term financial drag. I also encountered someone trying to sell internal documents, which says plenty about the governance culture at the time.
Then I saw the BBC go through outsourcing to Fujitsu, with assets sold off and then effectively contracted back.
Across utilities, government, healthcare and broadcasting, the pattern has been depressingly consistent: short-term accounting savings, long-term operational debt, and layers of complexity presented as reform. Problems are rarely solved. They are moved around, rebranded, outsourced, and made to look resolved until the next team inherits the consequences.
Capgemini, Fujitsu and the usual suspects do well out of it. The public sector gets another five-year spreadsheet win, while the real-world cost lands years later with someone else.
All rather depressing when you see it first hand and many stories I dare not tell, from Ministers and their `shadows`(what their assistants called), upper goverment stories and even from infosec days involving banks and financial intertutions and how links that should never be there were found. Networks connected by undocumented lines and other things that just make you go WTF at levels of disbelief, even No.10 dealings that again, best left unspoken.
Just a system that focuses on being seen to care, over actually careing and if you do care, you are either broken or scared for life.
Oh well, be another decade or two to unpick the debt bombing this time around and those that cause it, never held to account as seagull managment is now the norm in many walks of life along with doing little waiting for pensions with pension surfing. This that care, die, those who don't get promoted on lies.
I will write a book to be published when i'm gone(soon) and just not care then, until then, I care, just wished those with power actually did.
I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas about a similar concept in the NHS that would require the government hiring well-paid software engineers.
* need the ability to stop paying the person
* have a duty-cycle lower than 83% on the contractor over the next 10 years
Paying a premium for flexibility is pretty standard business practice. I suppose I’m somewhat surprised the gap is merely 20%. With the triple-lock etc. in place I think that’s a screaming deal and I would take on as many substitutions as possible.
They turned away from the Soviets because the Soviets only wanted them to be an agricultural nation, and wouldn't allow them to develop their own industry.
When the powers that be refuse to invest in themselves and demand that external providers must be used, it does make you wonder...
Just keep in mind that if you pay someone a salary of £100k, your expense for that employee is actually much higher. So £120k would be less expensive and you also don’t take on thr risk and cost of developing a system (you’re getting “off the shelf”).
When you realise that any Government is ultimately a business, it's revenue is mostly tax, and its costs, are like any other business - salaries, then crappy salaries for Government employees makes more sense.
> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.
There's also the (implicit) argument that the (UK) Government is also not having to pay up a (Civil Service) pension scheme, private health (!!), and the consultancy is picking that up, so that's also 'good'.
It did, I'd argue the first (and in a sense final) nail in the coffin was the Electricity Act (1989).
Take a look at this job posting for example: https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/C9175-26-0093 .
The role is more aligned with IT/Data as obvious by the fact that the main skill requirement is SQL.
The British government and public sector are constantly limiting themselves by being unwilling to pay market rates for the skills they need. Then they contract out needs like tech to work around the bureaucracy - but they demand so many strings attached that the little guys who are more cost effective don't want anything to do with it. And so they mostly outsource to large firms or sometimes specialist agencies who have jumped through the hoops to get all the right certifications. Naturally those suppliers are in a position to charge premium rates even for relatively simple work.
If the Civil Service built up a capable IT function staffed by properly qualified and experienced people that would surely save billions in budget and years in timescales for some of the (in)famous government IT projects and probably significantly increase the odds of successfully delivering something usable at the end of them. But as anyone who's working in our Civil Service can tell you the emphasis on ranks and pay scales and other very specific rules about career advancement are unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. Even if they did the culture of people moving around the Civil Service like interchangeable parts instead of building up deep expertise in specific areas would still be a problem.
That said, I don't think there's that much wrong with that job description - I've been a software dev/eng for 15yrs and every role has had SQL at its centre. And its much easier to get someone new up to speed on some swanky new UI or scripting tool than it is with SQL IME, so prioritising people who are comfortable with the hard bits sounds fine to me.
No, wait, I've read it a bit more closely. It's all about Data warehousing. OK yeah, that's a data job.
It is horrible to work for them and in fact in consulting as soon as you hear that the project is for the NHS people run and hide not to be assigned.
Amusingly, the person concerned has the surname "Swindells"...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6c548670-0f3e-45f1-ba08-8bb6dd152...
Today in things that the press isn't legally allowed to describe as corrupt but would probably reach the intuitive threshold for corruption for most people who this is explained to.
I get the same feeling every time I see oracle chosen for anything.
Because of financial kickbacks. This is also why people should be suspicious at the current age-sniffing movement. Their next move was "VPNs must be abolished". We can see which mega-corporations finance those movements. Quite suspicious how different countries so easily "copy-paste" this legislation.
Because where they are in their career at that point isn't the endgame and being the person that does the deal and throws the money around is how you get the board position where you broker those deals with governments, the NGO think tank position, essentially all the actually high paying roles.
Same reason the US political system is falling apart - buyable businessmen eh I mean politicians in power. „Lobbying“
when I was in the UK my landlord was a politician. his peers are politicians.
an inflated contract gets given out to a private company - no one complains. yet to give people working in councils, civic sector decent | market rate salaries. now everyone complains.
I'm not even gonna go into the whole taxation scam.
The data here [1] are for the US but I'd expect it's quite similar for the UK as well, since 1971 is when Bretton Woods ended and the beginning of the era of funny money.
You know, the things you need for spying and war etc
Agreed. It is said that Peter Mandelson had links to Palantir. (1) And also Wes Streeting (2)
1) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/04/peter-mande...
Selling out the UK apparently gives you knighthoods and lordships.
[1] Palantir was incubated by In-Q-Tel under the auspices of Alan Wade, who was co-founder of Christine Maxwell's (sister of Ghislaine) Chiliad. Chiliad was a data analytics company used in the FBI after 9/11. Thiel had many Epstein contacts and invested with Ehud Barak.
1. they aim to deliver product company margins with a consulting-heavy model.
2. your software purchase funds a cadre of "free" FDEs and deployment strategists who customize your install, build a bunch of data pipes/transforms, and talk to people to figure out what all the data means.
This could be a good deal if your tech org is not very competent at integrating your data, or if you have a sudden, short-term need. In the longer term, it's probably cheaper and more effective to develop a competent tech team, modernize the source data systems, and roll your own integration -- but that also requires leaders with long-term vision who are resistant to external hype and pressure.
This is the kind of thing GDS and other Civil Service departments build all the time, its a completely standard kind of challenge that a small team of Devs (+ supporting staff) from a departments DDAT department does day in and day out.
The output will be open source by default and use existing standards.
That America's brightest tech minds can't solve this problem is embarrassing. (Never mind the baggage of giving a foreign, potentially adversarial nation access to something as sensitive as residency and visa information.)
And ran out of rows
Free software from Palantir is not free. Peter Thiel's co is all about monopolies.
Oh, and don't forget to opt your data out of Palantir: https://your-data-matters.service.nhs.uk/
For context, the Homes for Ukraine refugee scheme cost 2-3 billion as of 2023. I can't seem to find an updated cost. This cost (from the article) was Palantir working for free for the first 6 months (could they have beat that, time wise?), then awarded 4.5m and 5.5m for two more 12 month terms, and now they're transitioning to something home-grown instead.
> The MHCLG [ Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government] said it initially needed a system which could be ready within days but, in seeking a "steadier service", later created an updated platform to meet the programme's longer-term needs and bring down costs.
I basically agree with the MHCLG's reasoning here. It's always worth at least experimenting to see if you can roll your own.
You were talking about a team of 5 cranking this out in about 2-3 months with some longer term part time involvement, with an annual cost of less than 1m and those people mostly all dellivering several product lines ( so actual cost is half or a quater ).
Governments build these kinds of systems ("collect data from a bunch of internal systems and show some public forms and have some internal processes for handling form submissions") all the time. When I worked for a local municipality, we built something like this every other month.
The difference is always having one or two devs who care. Every successful software project I've ever seen has had a few devs who care way more than is healthy
The company bid for this contract, and lost to Palantir. I still can't believe that a company trying to do this in exactly the right way lost to a US intelligence company.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388245/uk-sick-leave-fi...
Now, I get it. The UK is not exactly providing good jobs for a lot of people, so of course we're seeing this. But, getting a mental health diagnosis, be long-term-sick and avoiding unemployment while both getting paid by an employer and getting unfair advantages out of the public health system ...
In the UK, long term sick leave with a mental health diagnosis is a way to be unemployed (ie. not working) but not have the disadvantages of that. There's the money difference: 530 pounds per month for sick leave, 338 or 425 pounds per month for unemployment. On long-term sick leave you get all advantages job seekers get (ie. "Universal Credit"), PLUS others (support for not being able to work, ESA, and support for extra living expenses due to long-term sickness, PIP). So if you don't want to work, long-term sick leave has many advantages (you can even put that you're working on your CV), plus it's a big cost to employers. You don't have to look for work in long-term sick leave. In fact, nothing is expected at all (other than medical evidence).
2.8 million people are long-term ill, not participating in the workforce, not being economically productive at all, at least half due to being diagnosed with mental illness. The issue with this is that this is happening with full support of government employees, and even the courts cooperate to a lesser extent.
What the government is trying to do, in other words, is trying to kick people off, uh, let's say "mental disability", force them to work. And they need to do this without relying on government workers, because they often side with the people on sick leave.
Hence, Palantir. Being hated is a feature here, not a bug.
"NHS England has granted external staff from companies including Palantir “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data while working on a part of its flagship data platform. "
What could possibly go wrong?
Tjheir "ELITE" guide says that during "special operations" normal safeguards may need to be turned off.
Palantir's Maven Smart System ha grown into a Pentagon program of record with 20,000+ active users. "Human in the loop" may become "human rubber stamp" when the number and speed of AI recommendations exceed real human review capacity.
A Palantir-backed program reportedly operated secretly from city council members, defense attorneys, and the public.
Vendor lock-in issue: once a system becomes embedded in agency workflows, switching vendors becomes politically and operationally hard and they are trying their best to achieve this. The Army's $10 billion enterprise agreement consolidating many contracts into one Palantir platform is the cleanest example of institutional dependence.
--- tldr;
The accountability chain is broken: when harm happens, the agency blames the tool, the vendor blames the customer, the operator blames policy, and the model blames the data.
---
Also, I won't share the full report link since whenever I share something like that here, I get banned/flagged for a day.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/26055524.palantir-hired-30...
Spending 10x more on IBM or Palantir can't get them fired, but trying to build something in-house their organization don't have competence for can get them fired.
And this is even if you don't take lobbying or corruption into account.
Build: you need expertise in contracts, knowing what you need and also software development.
It's obviously easier to buy than build, especially for civil service roles where they can't attract the best developers due to political/ideological constraints.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
1. Palantir isn't selling consulting as much as Palantir is selling the confidence you get from buying a name brand. It's the same as paying for McKinsey to provide justification to do what you already want to do.
2. Palantir actually has some good core tech. An in house team can probably do a better job just because the incentives are better aligned, but they'll be starting from behind and have to catch up.
3. LLMs aren't at a level to replace a team of FDEs. Maybe in a couple of years. The role requires too much understanding of the human systems, and too much initiative to keep the ball rolling/acknowledge and deal with real problems.
Mistakes were made (I would argue intentionally because of local wallet minima with stakeholders), there is a sunk cost to using Palantir. The country can't even develop it further, because it's Palantir's. That's not an argument to keep using it.
The country needs to develop the ability, to develop critical national infrastructure (this includes software, obviously is not limited to it). I would also argue it already has the ability, we need to prevent it from withering away.
Palantir will do the same as local companies (building on top of open source) except it needs to make a large tech profit and with its monopolistic ability, It will capture the value for itself.
Procurement has a misaligned efficiency incentive. Procurement and governments want a single provider so it's less direct cost on them on managing projects. Sadly, they've actually unnaturally forced a monopoly, resulting in serious costs and inefficiencies in the long term. We need a way to encourage multiple providers for the same thing, and allow new companies to join in even when they're late. Just like B2B and B2C.
I wonder if anyone has some thoughts in this area
Not having the system (it's not like it's already in use anyway) is always a good step in the right direction. And a replacement built-in UK will provide more jobs, more tax money, and digital sovereignty for UK.
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/05/palantir-to-be-granted...
It didn't work very well, so GDS rebuilt it in-house.
Why is that an issue? The simplest explanation is that the underlying rate of mental illness is inconveniently high. Which would tally with, as you say:
> In fact, nothing is expected at all (other than medical evidence).
Also I would take a look at the date when the upcurve starts on that chart and ask myself: was there some sort of mass disabling event that happened about then? Might that be contributing?
What’s the counterweight to keep the system in check and from growing out of control? If the only message is yes, it sets up a positive feedback loop.
Looking back and guessing whether Covid justifies it is post hoc rationalization. It says nothing about the validity of individual claims. Fraud schemes in the same timeframe could benefit just as well.
Of course, the complaint from economists is long-term sick people being occupied 12+ months getting better is worsening at about 7% per year, over 40% in the 2020-2026 period ( ... and in the supposed big success cases Palantir Foundry brings 28% improvement.
Also: collecting the parts and posting here.
https://archive.ph/Hg7xN https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-1-Und...
https://archive.ph/IE9oi https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-2-Del...
https://archive.ph/zp5cU https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-3-The...
The TLDR: because the NHS leadership has systematically refused to upgrade their IT[1], does not actually make the data they get available, their IT is considered unhelpful by hospitals and clinicians which leads to "gaps in the data" [2], and because NHS management will not either hire people to do analyses and will not learn/understand things like SQL to do it themselves, they cannot act on the data.
SO ... what Palantir brings is:
1) a quick AI-driven way to make apps to implement particular workflows. AI writes apps instead of "shadow IT". Just AI written applications shared by frontline staff on a "solution exchange".
2) a data ingestion process that makes up whatever data is missing (apparently this is called "ontology": the AI model fills missing data in with what it thinks is happening. No mention of hallucination and it's effects).
Somehow Palantir does this without any kind of change in IT at the edge. Ie. hospitals, mental health wards, ... keep all their existing IT (he mentions this means no investment is needed in it at all)
3) a way for NHS management to "cooperate", which appears to mean to query this data that does not involve any kind of actually knowing what they're doing or hiring analysts. Which apparently leads to delays (no doubt because analysts ask for clarification which management doesn't know or care about). "Plain-English analytics". Oh and in case you're wondering: he descirbes it as a POSITIVE that it is fast but inaccurate.
Apparently "somehow" a frustrating part of this is that "data extraction is frustrating" and it clashes with traditional NHS data engineering practices (translation: existing NHS analysts say that the data Palantir produces is bullshit)
It ends on a "positive" note: no worries, it'll be pushed through past these people calling bullshit. Just makes things harder and slower. No explanation as to how this statement vibes with him leaving.
[1] They still use access databases running on single machines NOT even VMs
(He comments many of those systems cost hundreds of thousands of pounds "before counting the staff needed to run them". Note that this is supposedly a source of savings of going with Palantir, but also they won't be replaced, because that costs too much ...)
[2] ie. you go to another hospital, even with a referral, often they don't know about that referral. This has caused staff at hospitals to bypass the NHS organization in many cases, and even the NHS itself acknowledges that bypassing the NHS administration is a necessity.
1. ICE awarded Palantir a reported $30 million contract for ImmigrationOS, described as a platform to support immigration lifecycle operations, including enforcement prioritization and self-deportation tracking.
2. Palantir’s Maven Smart System was designated a Pentagon ‘program of record’ in March 2026, with 20,000+ active military users and a contract ceiling that grew from $480 million to $1.3 billion.
3. The US Army’s $10 billion enterprise agreement consolidates 75 separate contracts into one Palantir platform.
4. The Maven Smart System has 20,000+ military users across 35+ military tools.
5. The UK NHS Federated Data Platform, valued at £330 million ($448.4 million), places Palantir at the center of England’s health-data architecture.
6. Palantir’s UK public contracts across NHS, Ministry of Defence, councils, and police forces total more than £500 million.
7. NHS England’s Data Protection Impact Assessment documents 15 inherent risks, all assessed as ‘Low’ residual risk after mitigations.
8. The NHS FDP contract was published with 417 of 586 pages redacted.
9. Palantir received more than $113 million in federal spending since Trump took office, plus a $795 million Pentagon contract.
10. Polling cited by The Guardian indicates more than two-thirds of the UK public are concerned about Palantir’s growing number of public contracts, and 40% distrust Palantir specifically regarding NHS patient data.
11. From detection to ‘prosecution’ (killing), ‘no more than two or three minutes elapse’ with Palantir systems, compared to six hours previously.
12. Palantir’s lobbying spending more than quadrupled since 2019, from $1.4 million to $5.8 million.
I can't believe that in our timeline Europe has to think like this, but here we are.
Note that Palantir is an American company that failed to solve this problem well, and introduces an adversarial risk to the UK.
But if you have a government department that builds software, they can also spec it. And everyones interests are aligned.
Further you open the door to bell labs/DARPA type speculative work.
Seems to me, the type of work environment where you have that freedom, are able to open source work would be attractive to a lot of people.
Can you cite this, please?
I'll give you an example. At a previous employer, We used Google Analytics. We paid for Google Analytics. I feel positive that as a mid size company, We shouldn't have paid for Google Analytics. The free product with 50 events in GA4 should be plenty for us. But why do we use Google Analytics in the first place? Because everyone uses Google Analytics.
I agree that sometimes Salesforce might be a good idea. However, it should be a part of an overall strategy, not just because everyone does it. This kind of deliberate tooling strategy is difficult though because the way Google Analytics or Salesforce works from what I understand is make marketing folks feel they are specialized in Google Analytics or Salesforce so they feel like they have to keep using it or their skill will become useless.
It is like resume driven development but for the whole business.
It's like this for most software, but as a salaryman it's better for you if you use the common software. If you have an interview you can now say "I know how to use the thing that most people use" instead of "Actually we had an inhouse system so if you hire me I need to be onboarded for 3 months".
I got hired to my 2nd job in large part because I knew how to use Broadridge Paladyne (back then it was pretty good if you got over the pretty bad UI/UX, by today's standards it's not great).
„Everyone does that“ is definitely part of decision-making process almost everywhere, but I personally have not seen companies where it’s just a cargo cult rather than a reasonable strategic choice. The obvious benefits are that it’s easier to find implementation partners, the costs are predictable and your users may already know the system, so you won’t have unnecessary friction in your ops.
If you pay money to Palantir, they are providing a service in return. That service is investment in your own economy, you pay them and then you own the thing they produce. Money does not "escape", the same amount of money is there before and after. The reason the UK is doing bad is this kind of bizarre economic xenophobia combined with a complete hostility to any kind of innovation or change. The question is: why don't we have a company competing with Palantir? Should be very obvious.
A free market is not a means to an end. Part of the reason that the USA was (until recently) doing so well was that the winner-takes-all mentality of the free-market benefits Silicon Valley, but that doesn't mean that other nation states have to submit to that philosophy.
Let's be very pessimistic about it (in real life it's much less), and say the public servant is gonna cost you 80k€/year. That's still at the VERY least ~50% cheaper than the 150k€/year consultant.
It's mathematically impossible for a consultancy putting money into shareholders to be more economically-efficient than a public administration. There's not a single historical example of that. Privatization of railway, energy and hospitals here in Europe was supposed to bring better service and reduce costs: it has done exactly the opposite.
By comparison it is much harder (and also much more likely to generate negative newspaper headlines) to make 500 people redundant.
Nice try, but that's begging the question. Why is it a problem for the government employees to do their jobs and for the courts to enforce the law?
> Looking back and guessing whether Covid justifies it is post hoc rationalization.
So is making an accusation of rampant fraud that just happened to coincide with a badly-contained pandemic. Occam's Razor makes increased sickness the null hypothesis. It's on you to do more than raise vague insinuations if you want to show the main weight of the problem here is anything other than that, with the usual derisory level of fraud at the edges as a rounding error.
> It says nothing about the validity of individual claims.
Let me introduce you to a concept you may find useful: go and read up on this thing called "statistics", you might find it helps.
> Fraud schemes in the same timeframe could benefit just as well
And? Show they're the problem. Show them increasing. Show why they started increasing exactly then.
So that's why an interconnected system is required in order to share data between the trusts while maintaining compatibility with their existing processes
Bear in mind there is a 23.7% pension contribution from the employer, so it's a roughly £62-70k total comp for a mid-level role.
Edit: Actually though, in reality I would expect a salary bump to work in the public sector to encourage one to put up with the terrible working enviornment with all the bureaucracy.
The reason they can't offer the higher salary instead is government pensions are un-funded usually, hence their 20-30% contribution is actually just a commitment to pay you much much later, they don't actually put anything into a protected pot for you.
Almost all governments have a legally defined public procurement framework. If this is overridden, it's pretty much always by elected politicians, not by regular government employees.
> Almost all governments have a legally defined public procurement framework.
> If this is overridden, it's pretty much always by elected politicians, not by regular government employees.
Also it's not like 4 years ago either UK or EU governments would expect they will soon want to get rid of all US companies in their public sector.
But its kind a obvious why some system for refugees was outsourced for consultancy.
The fantasy lies in ignoring the same risk when it's happening in a private sector contractor, doing the same job for objectively much higher costs.
If the civil service could shape its workforce with individualised salaries and quicker removal due to low performance I suspect it'd be a different story. I agree that consultancies and contractors are not cheap, but they are not the root cause.
Productivity hasn't increased in the public sector since 1997 due to massive overhiring and bloat, salaries are probably 20-30% higher than they should be based upon on productivity. And the main cost, which isn't factored into the above tired lobbying arguments you read from "sources" in the Guardian, is pensions. Public-sector pensions will rise to 10% of all public spending in the near future.
This is all by intent by the way, the primary issue is that existing employees have impossibly good conditions and it is effectively impossible to reform the system in any way. So you have these people are massively overpaid by any measure screeching about private sector hiring...okay, alternative: 20-30% of workforce are sacked, pensions converted to private scheme with 2% employer contribution, stack rank every year until public sector productivity equals private sector productivity.
>There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.
The parent is specifically claiming gov jobs don't allow for near market rates. That number would literally be formulated by current market pressures. If that goes lower in the private sector it will go lower in the gov sector.
For your point to be correct with respect to their specific example, you would have to claim the gov could pay £300k/year when the going market rate was £100k/year and there would be no pressure to prevent this. Whereas all it would take would be someone to ask why a run-of-the-mill programmer is getting paid 3x the market rate?
> but at least you won't have "inefficient civil service bloat" to have to manage.
repeated like a mantra.
As if megacorps somehow don't have inefficiencies. And how do we even measure efficiency?
Hmm, in the US the size of the civil service was roughly constant over 20 years, while the population it served grew enormously as well as the amount of service it was supposed to provide.
The market pressure I'm referring to isn't on salaries, it's on departments. If a department gets the same budget next year because it managed to spend it all this year - a universal truth in UK public sector then departments only ever grow.
If they get things wrong by overspending or overinvesting in the wrong thing, they don't have a wellspring of tax money to keep drawing from. They have to offer enough value to not only supply the good and make a profit, but also pay taxes on that profit.
FDR, who can hardly be accused of distrusting the public sector, emphasized the importance of public control over government sector salaries: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/unions
In other words, “rent seeking”.
The only protection against pilfering of the public coffers appears to be strong cultural opposition to it, so exactly the opposite of what’s happening in the US, for example.
we can bemoan that the government isn't being efficient, but involving people with even less oversight whose only goal is to extract as much from the public coffer as possible is not a magic bullet that gets the public more for their money.
It is insanity to watch.
has the inbuilt assumption that 'market forces' are the only appropriate form of external control.
which is homeomorphic to "ideological mistrust of the public sector".
And your second point is wrong too. See Scandinavia for places that both have a deep trust in the public sector and also deeply believe in markets and market forces.
They are subject to the same market forces though. It's this exact thing that's killing government competency; the pay scales are set lower for a role in the government than at other corporations so qualified candidates do not apply to the government.
Ex. Google's annual revenue is ~400 B and it's CEO makes ~200 M/yr while USA's annual reveune is ~5,000 B and Trump makes ~0.4 M/yr.
Ex. Google's board members make ~500 k/yr while congress critters make < 150 k/yr
But also the GS-15 caps out around 200k which means that the best you're going to make in the USG is worse than an entry level employee at Google.
Try hiring 100 software developers at civil service rates. You’ll get maybe 10 very talented people who are in it for “the mission” or for other ideological reasons, and about 90 who would be unemployable anywhere else.
And that’s after you’ve already excluded 95% of the market with citizenship and location requirements, suitability to hold a security clearance etc.
Or rethinking approaches, and doing such work via OSS, and paying maintainers to keep code up to date, which France has been doing iirc.
So please, it's never been accurate to say the government is mismanaged while corporations aren't. The same things happens in bureaucracies of similar size.
actually kind of makes sense. The £600 a day is as long as you need it and can be stopped when you don't. A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.
I suppose they do seem a little unpopular, they aren't breaking 30% but they seem relatively popular compared to the more fringe groups like, say, LAB and CON. Have they, in what I assume is decades of stable political governance, made any mistakes that might have engendered this ideological distrust in how well the political system is managed?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...
Sure. Because the government only needs a finite amount of software, and once it's written its more efficient to drop the people who wrote it.
> a guaranteed job for life
so the person will have to deal with all of their shit if they wrote crappy stuff. Obviously not the incentives we want.
> and gold plated pension.
because who wants people to be able to actually retire? Isn't it better to keep them working as greeters at Walmart?
Most of the GDS crowd (who were good), left to go elsewhere due to boredom/frustration.
The cost of not having good staff is very high to government. DEFRA were recently hiring senior enterprise architects on £70k. They could burn a lot of money (millions) on poor technical decision making but somehow saving 30-50k is the priority.
Sounds like we really need to rethink this massive perk about government jobs. Having a class of people with guaranteed employed for life with no accountability on performance or value they add, always seemed absolutely insane to me.
Can you picture a company replacing 90% of their workforce every 4 or 8 years, all at once? Because that's what I think would happen if government employees could be fired as easily.
See eg https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c072prlxlddo
Meanwhile, at least eight of their councilors elected last week have quit already due to comedy levels of misconduct. https://www.markpack.org.uk/176783/how-many-councillors-has-...
I'm not actually sure what you're proposing you think the major reasons are, since that article is just a reminder that people with money have noticed what a disaster the EU is too, not just average voters.
> While you've clearly mastered the tone of supercilious sarcasm that is the mainstay of British politics...
I will admit a feeling of loss that I couldn't work in "unstained escutcheon" but that would be too obscure a reference. I doubt Rees-Mogg would have baulked.
> Meanwhile, at least eight of their councilors elected last week have quit already due to comedy levels of misconduct.
And a supplementary question - do you feel this is "ideological mistrust of the public sector" coming through? Or is it something else when you do it?
Corporations might be mismanaged, but ultimately they have a variety of price signals they must be responsive to or die. No such thing among the feds and it shows.