Comment by PaulRobinson
5 hours ago
I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years.
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.
Remember hearing about Albania during the Cold War.
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...
> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.
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.
> £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good
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.
> The £600 a day is as long as you need it and can be stopped when you don't.
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?
> A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.
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.
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It’s not “ideological mistrust of the public sector.” It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.
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
> It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls,
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".
Consultancies don’t appear to be subject to market forces either, judging by their complete dearth of talent and expertise.
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.
> It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.
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.
> As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow
And this mistrust is deliberately sewn by right-wing politicians and media figures who are directly funded by government contractors.
Just wandering in to this as a relative political bystander, but as I look at the polling out of the UK [0] I see that the party currently leading is some group called "REF" and I gather they did pretty well in the latest round of elections. I assume they're an old-established party who represent the deep contentment the British have with how the public service has been run.
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...
In Estonia this was solved by moving all the IT related people to organisations adjacent to the ministries and departments, so the lower paid civil servants wont have to be compared to the highly paid software developers and architects, etc. One colleague used to work as and architect of the justice ministry. He said the suit wearing civil servants with law degrees were pissed off at the homeless looking sweatshirt wearing software developers who were much higher paid. So the IT stuff was moved to another new department, but it still answers to the minister.
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
I’m not sure I buy that. That doesn’t explain what happens when the ministers budget gets slashed and as government policy there’s a push to outsource. It requires consistent commitment at a cultural level across governments. It works in Estonia because Estonia is a small enough country that there’s just no financial incentive for lobbying and it’s let to do its own thing.
This seems like a very practical solution lol.
Although the Government (and local Government) can employ 'heads' at market rate. It's just the rank-and-file that have banded salaries.
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'.
I recently joined a civil service organisation as a software developer. The organisation is currently going through an intense hiring process to replace the army of contractors they've had for years. This has been made possible by applying a 'market uplift' to the usual civil service salary bands to make the roles competitive in the tech industry. It seems to be going pretty well, although the organisation was already quite tech focused and has a well established engineering culture. Hopefully it will be seen as a success and replicated by other departments as seems like the sensible way to get stuff done to me.
I remember chatting with the then-mayor of Cambridge, UK about this.
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.
That happens at all large organisations. I worked at a large oil company and if our contracts with a vendor represented (or would have represented) more than a certain % (i forget what) of that vendors business, they didn't get the contract. As well as having vendors more likely to stay in existence, it stops the org being "morally responsible" for keeping them afloat.
The problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders. There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.
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.
> there is always the risk of bloat
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.
I agree, but also a civil servant has incredible pension opportunities, and defined benefit as well, and is hard to remove if they turn out to be bad. A contractor is a fixed cost, and individuals can be rejected with far less ceremony and cost.
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.
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Yes Minister has something about this, I seem to remember. Because the government isn't profit motivated, they are instead motivated by the size of their budget and the number of employees.
What you wrote has nothing to do with what the parent wrote.
>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?
That part was referring to the air-quotes here:
> but at least you won't have "inefficient civil service bloat" to have to manage.
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> £100k/year = bad, £120k/year
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”).
Hopefully it goes without saying but the person you're responding to was just giving an example. The contractor vs. permanent employee pay gap absurdity they're highlighting in government contracting is often much more profound than 20%. 100% higher pay for contractors doing the equivalent work in the US isn't uncommon.
You can also (generally) turn off the taps of the cost of the £120k/year incredibly quickly.
By comparison it is much harder (and also much more likely to generate negative newspaper headlines) to make 500 people redundant.
Yes, it's the fairy tale from the 1980s that if you privatize a public service it magically becomes "efficient" and cheaper. Those who believe this BS must be really bad at arithmetic.
> This all started in the 1980s
It did, I'd argue the first (and in a sense final) nail in the coffin was the Electricity Act (1989).