Comment by ilikerashers

Thing is, if you are a good developer/architect, you have lots of options to make this elsewhere. £100k is not a very high salary in London.

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.