This is pretty normal for government procurement, though. and in fact, most large organisation procurement. There's a whole wall of standards that the supplier must meet, e.g. ISO9000 that your little web-dev shop almost certainly doesn't. They won't buy from a supplier that is likely to go out of business. There's a ton of other criteria that you've got to meet to get the business. 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. The civil servant has nothing to lose from saying "no" and runs a risk if they say "yes".
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 think you're being a little unfair to the civil servant who has to follow the law regarding procurement.
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".
For a government contract we budgeted somewhere between 50k and 100k to change a deployment script.
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.
Yup. Governments have to follow all the laws, which often companies can ignore in the interests of speed.
Also, governments are large bureaucracies, with all the process that entails. And because there's no real benefit for them in delivering quicker, but lots of risk in delivering badly, this sort of stuff happens.
And even if doesn't, writing five online shops to send you a written offer takes a couple minutes and results in the same or lower prices
Procurement for such small items can be quick and sane. It's the larger items where rules tighten and procurement portals or bidding become mandated that are problematic
Nothing takes 'a couple minutes' when you have to sit down and research the five online shops, find if they are approachable, if they will deal with the restrictions of your purchasing department, find out how to submit a query. Many online shops just have a purchasing portal. Find the product, buy it here, pay for it and wait.
So loosely I purchase items at my work from a budget that I am allocated in an organisation that is ultimately responsible to the UK government. I need to justify that the items I am ordering are reasonably priced, and the organisation would really really like to have the goods before any money goes out. That means they want to place an order, receive the goods and and invoice, and then pay the invoice. Many online shops don't want to deal with that. We have accounts set up with many companies, but not all. If I want to buy some reams of 160gsm A4 white card (for example, the other day), that whole process is going to take at least 10 minutes. Some of our suppliers don't sell exactly that. Is 240gsm ok? I've got to go back to the person who wants it (no btw, I had to go find some and take it to them for comparison). More esoteric items are going to take longer. What exactly do I want to order?
So yeah, procurement is simple when you are at home with an amazon account. The items will be here tomorrow!
edit: oh, I didn't mention the free delivery.. a box of white card doesn't get me free delivery. Is there something else I can add onto that? Ok, the order will have to wait..
> I need to justify that the items I am ordering are reasonably priced
Unfortunately it sounds like the process is misaligned with the intention. I doubt this mechanism actually works for efficient budgeting and even when it appears to work, it’s probably at the cost of standard quality.
> 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.
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..
You know Yes Minister was a documentary, right? ;)
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.
About 20 years ago, so yes, I might be a little out of date ;)
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.
> "Your system is NOT hard, it is you and your procurement procedures that are generally making it hard for small companies to help you, and it is you and your procurement systems and attitude that will likely make the project fail, be delayed or go over-budget."
It's common to all large organisations. Because large organisations get like this; if everyone does their own procurement then money gets misused, wasted, and becomes uncontrolled. So they centralise procurement, and that disconnects it from the people who understand what they're buying, so they have to control it through process, and the process bloats until we get to this point.
One of the many, many, arguments for not allowing organisations to get this big.
Still it does not need to be this way. Large organisations used to actually get s** done generally in budget and on time. Now we can’t even do a simple tasks without mountains of paper work and cash. I know, my partner used to work in a related industry, it’s painful to hear their stories.
Because corruption is a thing. Also: any government contract can be audited at any time by the National Audit Office, who have criminal prosecution powers if they find malfeasance in the procurement process. Also: being hauled in front of a Select Committee to answer questions about a given procurement is not fun. Also: politicians are always looking to ask questions that get their names in the paper.
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.
I don't doubt you're correct about the incentives, but one point seems amiss...
> 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?
Nope. They followed the process, they bought from an approved, respected, supplier. The site meets the specification they drew up. There will be meeting notes from a few hundred meetings to document that everyone did their job properly.
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.
ISO9000 is, bar none, the most brilliant grift I have ever encountered. It's so simple, yet so elegant.
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.
Just like any other kind of certifications in the same domain.
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’m reading the original tender and there is zero mention of ISO 9000. In fact, the tendering authority even specifically stated this opportunity was a good fit for SMEs.
which was when I realised this was a rabbit hole and while I am positive that somewhere deep in that rabbit hole would be a requirement for all procurement suppliers to meet ISO9000 or similar, I was going to have to spend hours finding it. Hours I don't have.
You can cheerfully dismiss this opinion if you like, I don't have the data to provide you evidence.
But I also think this proves my point; if you have to spend hours just finding out what the requirements are, you probably don't meet them.
It's there in the The Model Services Contract, under Core Terms:
> Quality Plans
> 6.1 The Supplier shall develop, within [insert number] Working Days of the Effective Date, quality plans that ensure that all aspects of the Services are the subject of quality management systems and are consistent with BS EN ISO 9001 or any equivalent standard which is generally recognised as having replaced it ("Quality Plans").
The Short Form Contract also have optional ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials (which is, uh, an adventure on its own). But there's also an option for no certification required. It depends on the contract.
But yes, you're right. Dealing with requirements takes time and experience and you likely need a dedicated person (or team) to deal with it.
If this was a good fit for SME, and the price paid for the whole thing was 4M pounds, why didn’t any SME win the tender? Seriously, that’s the whole yearly turnover for most SME shops I ever worked at. And all of them could do a better job than this.
That's possibly why: small businesses reliant on contracts that are, to them, disproportionately huge.. well, they die at the end of the contract. HMRC killed off an OpenStack based AWS competitor by replacing them, about ten years ago. Anchor clients can be a real hazard if an SME can't live without them. Sometimes it just isn't worth it.
For government tenders, I do know that agencies need certification. Maybe not ISO2001 (which is a security standard that many corporate procurement processes require the supplier to have obtained when purchasing software), but Cyber Essentials / Cyber Essentials Plus is common.
Please show me on the doll where ISO 9000 hurt you!
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?
My father was a ISO9000 and ISO9001 certification consultant for over 10 years. He taught at Cal Poly Pamona, near the end of that era. This was my first exposure to using the familiar terms seen in RFCs like MUST MAY SHALL, etc.
Ever tried to write a quality based document describing how to create an air filled, japanese oragami balloon? (step 3 is the first big hurdle, https://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Origami-Balloon). That was his goto starter for ISO classes.
> 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?
ISO standards don't ensure this, since certification is only based on verifying documentation format. What the ISO processes do tend to do is create a small memo indicating that every dept should justify the work they are doing by writing it down and showing it to their boss. What that does to an organization is to produce a crapload of near-useless documentation and throw a large number of people into political hell. After that, the solution is always the same. They quickly move from everyone trying to coordinate down to a very small number of people (1-3) taking charge of moving dept to dept. Either the agents or the supervisors who are articulate enough to gloss over inconsistencies and gaps to form a coherent story, write the documentation.
While this may lend well to shoring up some companies' internals, in the early 2000s, ISO certification consultancy was a lucrative gig. It was chased as a stamp to markup pricing, rather than a quality tool.
I think "concentrates the mind towards doing things right" is an accurate statement. On the other hand the parent is also correct that it is almost impossible to fail and the requirements are too broad to actually have much effect. The most helpful thing is you get the knowledge and experience of an auditor for a day. Other benefits are having someone make you write your processes down and making it easier to replace people, making sure there is a chart documenting the relationships between the people and to have some language about dealing with customer complaints and defective produce.
In the past, expensive contracts like this were handed out as rewards to Tory donors. Help fund the party's re-election, and your company will receive a cushy reward. See also the Cash-for-Honours scandal, where the Labour party were also found giving preference to donors in the selection for lordships.
> 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.
All the same, you can have a long successful careeer, but you say nice things about Nigel the one time and forever after they'll call you a goat f*r and throw milkshakes on you :/
Interestingly, the UK PM (and allies) just blocked a would-be political rival Andy Burnham standing as an MP.
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!
Tangentially, Burnham has a long history with these sorts of public-sector private vampires, having been up to his neck in PFI (of "£200 to change a lightbulb" fame) in his stint leading the NHS.
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.
Being cynical i would say it's because Burnham could potentially challenge Starmer. Less cynically Labour has a big enough majority they can afford to lose this by election. The headache of replacing the mayor of Manchester is not worth it.
Why can't he just do both jobs? Boris did it iirc.
If memory serves, Dan Jarvis also did it, being both MP and mayor of the South Yorkshire city region or whatever it was called at the time.
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.
That's not inconsistency in the rules, that's inconsistency in what being the mayor means. In Sheffield it means you show up wearing funny clothes every so often, in Greater Manchester it means you have a full-time job, a large budget, and actual responsibilities.
For our American brethren, it's like the difference between being the Mayor of NYC vs the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade King.
It's actually the role of Police and Crime Commissioner that prevents them from being an MP simultaneously. In Greater Manchester (and London) the PCC role is combined with that of Mayor, but it isn't in most other city regions.
There's not much actual difference in the mayoral aspect of the roles - Jarvis was the Mayor of the South Yorkshire Combined Authority, not simply the mayor of Sheffield City Council.
I feel like the true scandal beneath all of these big government contracts is not necessarily the money spent, but actually how poor the services received are.
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.
The only way this is defensible is if they contracted out thousands of hours of custom content. Which from a quick scan they might have. If not, this is, at best, a remarkably poor outcome for the price paid.
As an american it's pretty cool to see how citizens can force representatives to debate an issue. But it's too bad even the most popular petitions just have "lol no" as the response.
There would've been an RFP for this, surely? Which means PwC was chosen to deliver this ahead of n number of other tenderers. I'd be curious to see what other proposals there were and the decision-making that went into choosing the winner.
Having worked in large corporates (and some government projects) issuing out RFPs, the final decision tends to go: let's just go with an established name like PwC even if they're more expensive (and given we have the budget approved already) as opposed to a small firm down the road that has a great portfolio, because if something goes wrong, I can say I relied on this big, proven firm, and not be criticized for using an unknown firm for such crucial work.
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.
I've seen some small firms crash and burn too, though. The problem is small firms are easy-come, easy-go; they don't have enough reputation at stake. Not sure what a good solution is.
You could have contracted 5 small firms for £400k each (which, for this project seems frankly seems excessive) and even if a couple failed to deliver you'd have gotten 3 separate products to choose the best quality one from, £148k to legally chase up the firms who failed to deliver, and still had £2 million left over.
I agree a good solution isn't easy to come up with, but the status quo is certainly an outrageously awful one.
There are dozens of "small firms" with plenty of reputation at stake. Or how about a "medium-sized firm". There's quite a few, probably a few hundred-thousand, options inbetween "PWC" and "my mate's nephew studying computer science".
It is funny how they link out to Salesforce's Trailhead site. Personally, I think it's a cute site for learning, but have also recently come to realize how sometimes it used to have a lot of political content too. One example I can think of is they used to have lessons related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution popularized by Klaus Schwab. At some point, they retired those lessons. My guess is they were retired around the same time that Schwab had some controversial allegations surrounding him.
Anyone else surprised by how the actual training content doesn't seem to cover true fundamentals (even for a broad, non-technical audience) that would include basics like pre-training, post-training, weights, context window, etc? I get that we're all flabbergasted by the website itself, but it's not like the content is redeeming either. Here in the US, I should've learned my lesson when what came out of the White House "AI Education Summit" wasn't a comprehensive plan to teach Americans about AI, but instead just a cheap ploy for tech companies to offer coupons and vouchers to start using their services.
I get the feeling you haven’t done much government consulting. The bill has nothing to do with the actual work; it’s meetings with stakeholders after stakeholder then coming out with a plan that will please everyone.
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
Probably depends on the department. I do grant and loan assessments for Innovate UK, and they have a rigorous and largely (+) transparent method for assessment which I would be happy to explain in detail. If we award money, it's accompanied by a monitoring officer (I do that as well) who is subject area expert with project management business experience. The MO meets the project every one or three months to review progress and approve payment of an installation of the grant or loan. We certainly wouldn't hand over £4M without good reason!
(+ 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).
It does to an extent but less so particularly from central government.
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
> The fact that it didn’t actually solve the problem is inconsequential to PwC
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...
I don't know of a department that does it as well as MoJ, though. Caveats exist around old private sector implemented systems like the prisons and probation databases etc, which even MoJ itself doesn't own the IP for. But everything made by civil servants or contractors at MoJ ends up published in that org unless there's a good reason not to.
Edit: FOI in principle allows you to request a cut of a git repo etc for a service, so you can impose annoyance upon departments that are less open.
I'm not quite as cynical as that to be honest. I do think it's abundantly clear that PwC and other major consultancies hire people who have experience in writing briefs to get major projects, and that they likely have an implicit preferential treatment becacuse they meet things like insurance requirements already without any overhead. It's also clear, allowed (and provable) that they will start with senior people who can make a good point and sell a good story, but will swap them out as soon as possible.
We have an amazing gov.uk web team, they could have expanded that and built it in house with civil servants costing £60k ea per annum at the very most.
£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?
Unfortunately because the top end of the salary is limited, to get people to work on stuff they need to bring in contractors to fill out the teams for many projects.
Magnitude is also important. If you overpay by 100% on a stick of gum that's bad deal but I likely to have any large consequences for you. But if you overpay for your house by 100% you're probably in a world of pain
CGI is a terrible company known for going over budget and under delivering on a ton of projects. Not that many companies bidding on large government contracts unfortunately
I worked there for 3 years as a graduate and I can absolutely agree with this comment, the guilt of knowing my project (which was a failure from start to finish) was funded by taxpayer money drove me away from the company and made me swear to never work at another big consultancy again.
Just the standard procurement. It's all about risk calculation. Award the contract to a branded company, because they tell you that no one got fired for buying IBM. From PwC side, "we already got the work, now just do the minimal thing to finish off the ceremony. Keep it crap and keep the work coming". Work comes back to you not because you have been delivering great products, but because they got locked into brand names and the mess that was created.
When I checked the site this morning, the first impression I had was: They could have just linked to deeplearning[.]ai and that would have been much better.
Better yet, a link to Kaggle and provide prize funding for a few dozen competitions with most of them open to UK residents only. Directly incentivise the most driven types of people to compete and learn and give local firms a way to identify talent.
But I guess donating another £4MM to PwC is more sensible.
I think most of the cost is for handling and collaborating with the government org. As an engineer who worked with Gov orgs before, I can say it is not easy; imagine how many levels of approvals were given to put that site online.
"...while £4 million is admittedly chump change for the UK government..."
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.
someones got a new Bentley for sure and some expensive wallpaper from John Lewis...it is a shame that a country like the UK doesn't have a frontier lab and a frontier model
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.
Easy to be angry but I won't comment until I see what exactly was delivered. These projects often have a lot of extra.
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.
What is funny is that I know plenty of great engineers that won't earn $4mil ever in their life. For that amount of money you could give 4 guys $1mil each to create an amazing resource and take care of it for the next 30 years. I wonder how much PwC will charge for ongoing hosting and maintenance.
The UK government want to write a cheque with our money for "Digital ID" whatever nebulous Tax + Services + Tracking that is... they can't even control costs on a tiny website, what is the cost of an everything site? Infinite pounds? Imagine what even a basic v1 spec for that looks like, it would probably never even be released.
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.
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.
At my last company (a telco that was government previously) they wound up paying $3 million for barely more than a Drupal theme for the public website.
Fun project to be on. We played “descope” bingo… but everyone won all the time.
This budget included a full modernization of their infrastructure as well as the website redesign. It's still heaps of money - but the media saying "a website cost $96 million AUD" is misleading.
It's very simple: if you're not spending your own money, so what?
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.
To Mahad and people who share the same mindset: If "Do better" the worst you can say at the end of an essay, you made yourself inconsequential. Nothing will change, except everyone in the world starts mocking you for being so weak and agreeable in the face of people who in turn care exactly nothing about you and see you merely as an object to be exploited.
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.
No it's not, that's what happens when people can spend someone else's money without consequences, potentially by asking a friend what they need. That happens everywhere, all the time, but let's not pretend this is economically efficient or acceptable.
If the request for proposal had been done fairly, that page would have cost a few tens of thousands.
Clearly the site is intended for a few mega-employers to push out as "training". How many employees do you think need to take the training to recoup £4.1 million in GDP? Not many.
This is pretty normal for government procurement, though. and in fact, most large organisation procurement. There's a whole wall of standards that the supplier must meet, e.g. ISO9000 that your little web-dev shop almost certainly doesn't. They won't buy from a supplier that is likely to go out of business. There's a ton of other criteria that you've got to meet to get the business. 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. The civil servant has nothing to lose from saying "no" and runs a risk if they say "yes".
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 think you're being a little unfair to the civil servant who has to follow the law regarding procurement.
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".
For a government contract we budgeted somewhere between 50k and 100k to change a deployment script.
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.
With all the hassle a government contract can bring, it's just not worth it for anything lower.
Screenshot of the top 3 results on Google shopping ought to do it
This was early-00s so it was slightly more trouble than that but still not the end of the world.
The point is, the person wasn't trying to hedge against looking bad, they literally had to do and document this.
Yup. Governments have to follow all the laws, which often companies can ignore in the interests of speed.
Also, governments are large bureaucracies, with all the process that entails. And because there's no real benefit for them in delivering quicker, but lots of risk in delivering badly, this sort of stuff happens.
And even if doesn't, writing five online shops to send you a written offer takes a couple minutes and results in the same or lower prices
Procurement for such small items can be quick and sane. It's the larger items where rules tighten and procurement portals or bidding become mandated that are problematic
Nothing takes 'a couple minutes' when you have to sit down and research the five online shops, find if they are approachable, if they will deal with the restrictions of your purchasing department, find out how to submit a query. Many online shops just have a purchasing portal. Find the product, buy it here, pay for it and wait.
So loosely I purchase items at my work from a budget that I am allocated in an organisation that is ultimately responsible to the UK government. I need to justify that the items I am ordering are reasonably priced, and the organisation would really really like to have the goods before any money goes out. That means they want to place an order, receive the goods and and invoice, and then pay the invoice. Many online shops don't want to deal with that. We have accounts set up with many companies, but not all. If I want to buy some reams of 160gsm A4 white card (for example, the other day), that whole process is going to take at least 10 minutes. Some of our suppliers don't sell exactly that. Is 240gsm ok? I've got to go back to the person who wants it (no btw, I had to go find some and take it to them for comparison). More esoteric items are going to take longer. What exactly do I want to order?
So yeah, procurement is simple when you are at home with an amazon account. The items will be here tomorrow!
edit: oh, I didn't mention the free delivery.. a box of white card doesn't get me free delivery. Is there something else I can add onto that? Ok, the order will have to wait..
> I need to justify that the items I am ordering are reasonably priced
Unfortunately it sounds like the process is misaligned with the intention. I doubt this mechanism actually works for efficient budgeting and even when it appears to work, it’s probably at the cost of standard quality.
> 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.
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..
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC#Litigation
You know Yes Minister was a documentary, right? ;)
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.
When was the last time you touted for this sort of business?
Strictly speaking its ISO 9001 but we do the same as you and call it ISO 9000. You forgot 27001 and 14001.
About 20 years ago, so yes, I might be a little out of date ;)
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.
Iso that everyone is certified but nobody can truly explain or follow, ensuring the money is extracted to the same bunch of bidders.
I wrote a relevant article on this last year "On-Time and Under-Budget. Where some IT projects are Probably Going Wrong." [https://rodyne.com/?p=2074]
> "Your system is NOT hard, it is you and your procurement procedures that are generally making it hard for small companies to help you, and it is you and your procurement systems and attitude that will likely make the project fail, be delayed or go over-budget."
Quoted for truth. Well said.
> This is pretty normal for government procurement, though
Why accept the status que? How many working lives of tax revenue did this bs consume?
It's common to all large organisations. Because large organisations get like this; if everyone does their own procurement then money gets misused, wasted, and becomes uncontrolled. So they centralise procurement, and that disconnects it from the people who understand what they're buying, so they have to control it through process, and the process bloats until we get to this point.
One of the many, many, arguments for not allowing organisations to get this big.
> Because large organisations get like this;
Still it does not need to be this way. Large organisations used to actually get s** done generally in budget and on time. Now we can’t even do a simple tasks without mountains of paper work and cash. I know, my partner used to work in a related industry, it’s painful to hear their stories.
Because corruption is a thing. Also: any government contract can be audited at any time by the National Audit Office, who have criminal prosecution powers if they find malfeasance in the procurement process. Also: being hauled in front of a Select Committee to answer questions about a given procurement is not fun. Also: politicians are always looking to ask questions that get their names in the paper.
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.
I don't doubt you're correct about the incentives, but one point seems amiss...
> 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?
Nope. They followed the process, they bought from an approved, respected, supplier. The site meets the specification they drew up. There will be meeting notes from a few hundred meetings to document that everyone did their job properly.
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.
ISO9000 is, bar none, the most brilliant grift I have ever encountered. It's so simple, yet so elegant.
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.
Just like any other kind of certifications in the same domain.
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’m reading the original tender and there is zero mention of ISO 9000. In fact, the tendering authority even specifically stated this opportunity was a good fit for SMEs.
Where does all this talk of standards come from?
In the tender there's one line:
> IV.1.8) Information about the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) The procurement is covered by the Government Procurement Agreement: Yes
Googling the UK Government Procurement Agreement got me to:
> https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-standar...
which was when I realised this was a rabbit hole and while I am positive that somewhere deep in that rabbit hole would be a requirement for all procurement suppliers to meet ISO9000 or similar, I was going to have to spend hours finding it. Hours I don't have.
You can cheerfully dismiss this opinion if you like, I don't have the data to provide you evidence.
But I also think this proves my point; if you have to spend hours just finding out what the requirements are, you probably don't meet them.
It's there in the The Model Services Contract, under Core Terms:
> Quality Plans
> 6.1 The Supplier shall develop, within [insert number] Working Days of the Effective Date, quality plans that ensure that all aspects of the Services are the subject of quality management systems and are consistent with BS EN ISO 9001 or any equivalent standard which is generally recognised as having replaced it ("Quality Plans").
The Short Form Contract also have optional ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials (which is, uh, an adventure on its own). But there's also an option for no certification required. It depends on the contract.
But yes, you're right. Dealing with requirements takes time and experience and you likely need a dedicated person (or team) to deal with it.
Thanks for going down the rabbit hole :)
If this was a good fit for SME, and the price paid for the whole thing was 4M pounds, why didn’t any SME win the tender? Seriously, that’s the whole yearly turnover for most SME shops I ever worked at. And all of them could do a better job than this.
That's possibly why: small businesses reliant on contracts that are, to them, disproportionately huge.. well, they die at the end of the contract. HMRC killed off an OpenStack based AWS competitor by replacing them, about ten years ago. Anchor clients can be a real hazard if an SME can't live without them. Sometimes it just isn't worth it.
For government tenders, I do know that agencies need certification. Maybe not ISO2001 (which is a security standard that many corporate procurement processes require the supplier to have obtained when purchasing software), but Cyber Essentials / Cyber Essentials Plus is common.
Cyber Essentials is a lot more of a PITA than 9001, it's very prescriptive in ways that cause all kinds of headaches without helping security.
I absolutely hated doing Cyber Essentials (Plus). Huge waste of time
Please show me on the doll where ISO 9000 hurt you!
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?
My father was a ISO9000 and ISO9001 certification consultant for over 10 years. He taught at Cal Poly Pamona, near the end of that era. This was my first exposure to using the familiar terms seen in RFCs like MUST MAY SHALL, etc.
Ever tried to write a quality based document describing how to create an air filled, japanese oragami balloon? (step 3 is the first big hurdle, https://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Origami-Balloon). That was his goto starter for ISO classes.
> 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?
ISO standards don't ensure this, since certification is only based on verifying documentation format. What the ISO processes do tend to do is create a small memo indicating that every dept should justify the work they are doing by writing it down and showing it to their boss. What that does to an organization is to produce a crapload of near-useless documentation and throw a large number of people into political hell. After that, the solution is always the same. They quickly move from everyone trying to coordinate down to a very small number of people (1-3) taking charge of moving dept to dept. Either the agents or the supervisors who are articulate enough to gloss over inconsistencies and gaps to form a coherent story, write the documentation.
While this may lend well to shoring up some companies' internals, in the early 2000s, ISO certification consultancy was a lucrative gig. It was chased as a stamp to markup pricing, rather than a quality tool.
I remember the backdated document signing parties at my previous company, the day before an ISO audit. So much fun!
I think "concentrates the mind towards doing things right" is an accurate statement. On the other hand the parent is also correct that it is almost impossible to fail and the requirements are too broad to actually have much effect. The most helpful thing is you get the knowledge and experience of an auditor for a day. Other benefits are having someone make you write your processes down and making it easier to replace people, making sure there is a chart documenting the relationships between the people and to have some language about dealing with customer complaints and defective produce.
In the past, expensive contracts like this were handed out as rewards to Tory donors. Help fund the party's re-election, and your company will receive a cushy reward. See also the Cash-for-Honours scandal, where the Labour party were also found giving preference to donors in the selection for lordships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-for-Honours_scandal
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-pwc-ey-big-four-natw...
> 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.
In unrelated news Labour quietly dropped its plans to "restructure" the audit industry last week.
I wish a fitting comeuppance upon all the grifters taking up a seat which could've been filled by someone actually interested in governance.
these are exactly the kinds of people interested in governance. That's the problem
whew, good thing Nigel Farage is a straight shooter interested strictly in good governance.
Risky life close to the edge you're sailing there...
"If the wind changes, you'll get stuck that way."
/s
For your comment or mine? I'm happy to share.
All the same, you can have a long successful careeer, but you say nice things about Nigel the one time and forever after they'll call you a goat f*r and throw milkshakes on you :/
My comment was sarcastic
That seemed clear when I first replied ...
"In the Past", Now, and in the future.
in every democracy or other system of government, it's the same.
It's because Tribalism and Nepotism are the default, not the exception.
Interestingly, the UK PM (and allies) just blocked a would-be political rival Andy Burnham standing as an MP.
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!
Tangentially, Burnham has a long history with these sorts of public-sector private vampires, having been up to his neck in PFI (of "£200 to change a lightbulb" fame) in his stint leading the NHS.
eg.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/28/labour-debt-peter...
https://doctorsforthenhs.org.uk/the-truth-about-the-lies-tha...
etc
And that's just it. Vampiric.
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.
Being cynical i would say it's because Burnham could potentially challenge Starmer. Less cynically Labour has a big enough majority they can afford to lose this by election. The headache of replacing the mayor of Manchester is not worth it.
Why can't he just do both jobs? Boris did it iirc.
If memory serves, Dan Jarvis also did it, being both MP and mayor of the South Yorkshire city region or whatever it was called at the time.
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.
The rules are inconsistent. You can be Mayor of Sheffield and an MP at the same time but you can’t be Mayor of Greater Manchester and an MP.
That's not inconsistency in the rules, that's inconsistency in what being the mayor means. In Sheffield it means you show up wearing funny clothes every so often, in Greater Manchester it means you have a full-time job, a large budget, and actual responsibilities.
For our American brethren, it's like the difference between being the Mayor of NYC vs the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade King.
It's actually the role of Police and Crime Commissioner that prevents them from being an MP simultaneously. In Greater Manchester (and London) the PCC role is combined with that of Mayor, but it isn't in most other city regions.
There's not much actual difference in the mayoral aspect of the roles - Jarvis was the Mayor of the South Yorkshire Combined Authority, not simply the mayor of Sheffield City Council.
I feel like the true scandal beneath all of these big government contracts is not necessarily the money spent, but actually how poor the services received are.
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.
You can read the tender for the contract:
https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/001337-2025?or...
And surprise, surprise, it's a lot more complex than simply "build a static website"!
The only way this is defensible is if they contracted out thousands of hours of custom content. Which from a quick scan they might have. If not, this is, at best, a remarkably poor outcome for the price paid.
This is so bad there should be a petition for this waste to be investigated in parlament
As an american it's pretty cool to see how citizens can force representatives to debate an issue. But it's too bad even the most popular petitions just have "lol no" as the response.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=all
if something is outrageous like this it's likely to come under the attention of someone who can raise the issue.
This is the state the world is at.
Scammers are winners.
There would've been an RFP for this, surely? Which means PwC was chosen to deliver this ahead of n number of other tenderers. I'd be curious to see what other proposals there were and the decision-making that went into choosing the winner.
Having worked in large corporates (and some government projects) issuing out RFPs, the final decision tends to go: let's just go with an established name like PwC even if they're more expensive (and given we have the budget approved already) as opposed to a small firm down the road that has a great portfolio, because if something goes wrong, I can say I relied on this big, proven firm, and not be criticized for using an unknown firm for such crucial work.
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.
I've seen some small firms crash and burn too, though. The problem is small firms are easy-come, easy-go; they don't have enough reputation at stake. Not sure what a good solution is.
You could have contracted 5 small firms for £400k each (which, for this project seems frankly seems excessive) and even if a couple failed to deliver you'd have gotten 3 separate products to choose the best quality one from, £148k to legally chase up the firms who failed to deliver, and still had £2 million left over.
I agree a good solution isn't easy to come up with, but the status quo is certainly an outrageously awful one.
The large firms' reputation isn't really at stake though. They keep doing crap like this and it never harms their ability to get more contracts.
There are dozens of "small firms" with plenty of reputation at stake. Or how about a "medium-sized firm". There's quite a few, probably a few hundred-thousand, options inbetween "PWC" and "my mate's nephew studying computer science".
UK Gov has a whole set of standards for building websites, yet it seems sites like this get to opt out of this.
It is funny how they link out to Salesforce's Trailhead site. Personally, I think it's a cute site for learning, but have also recently come to realize how sometimes it used to have a lot of political content too. One example I can think of is they used to have lessons related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution popularized by Klaus Schwab. At some point, they retired those lessons. My guess is they were retired around the same time that Schwab had some controversial allegations surrounding him.
Anyone else surprised by how the actual training content doesn't seem to cover true fundamentals (even for a broad, non-technical audience) that would include basics like pre-training, post-training, weights, context window, etc? I get that we're all flabbergasted by the website itself, but it's not like the content is redeeming either. Here in the US, I should've learned my lesson when what came out of the White House "AI Education Summit" wasn't a comprehensive plan to teach Americans about AI, but instead just a cheap ploy for tech companies to offer coupons and vouchers to start using their services.
Once you've done gov procurement, you can easily see why things like this cost this much. This is nothing.
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.
Looks like it is based on invisioncommunity. It is not even a bespoke website.
Imagine charging 4 milly for what amounts to a wordpress theme + module configuration.
I get the feeling you haven’t done much government consulting. The bill has nothing to do with the actual work; it’s meetings with stakeholders after stakeholder then coming out with a plan that will please everyone.
Damn, I'd have done it for £4.0
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
Probably depends on the department. I do grant and loan assessments for Innovate UK, and they have a rigorous and largely (+) transparent method for assessment which I would be happy to explain in detail. If we award money, it's accompanied by a monitoring officer (I do that as well) who is subject area expert with project management business experience. The MO meets the project every one or three months to review progress and approve payment of an installation of the grant or loan. We certainly wouldn't hand over £4M without good reason!
(+ 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).
We (Devyce) just submitted our Innovate UK application - would be cool if a fellow HN user ended up working with us!
I'll have to recuse myself if the application comes across my desk, but good luck with the application.
It does to an extent but less so particularly from central government.
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
> The fact that it didn’t actually solve the problem is inconsequential to PwC
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...
I feel like code for public systems, government systems should be open source.
https://github.com/govuk-one-login
Some of it is
A lot of it is! It has been this way for a long time in some parts of the public sector, eg:
https://github.com/ministryofjustice
I don't know of a department that does it as well as MoJ, though. Caveats exist around old private sector implemented systems like the prisons and probation databases etc, which even MoJ itself doesn't own the IP for. But everything made by civil servants or contractors at MoJ ends up published in that org unless there's a good reason not to.
Edit: FOI in principle allows you to request a cut of a git repo etc for a service, so you can impose annoyance upon departments that are less open.
I'm not quite as cynical as that to be honest. I do think it's abundantly clear that PwC and other major consultancies hire people who have experience in writing briefs to get major projects, and that they likely have an implicit preferential treatment becacuse they meet things like insurance requirements already without any overhead. It's also clear, allowed (and provable) that they will start with senior people who can make a good point and sell a good story, but will swap them out as soon as possible.
I think at that point, they just don't care.
We have an amazing gov.uk web team, they could have expanded that and built it in house with civil servants costing £60k ea per annum at the very most.
£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?
Unfortunately because the top end of the salary is limited, to get people to work on stuff they need to bring in contractors to fill out the teams for many projects.
US: I see your £4.1M and raise you $2.1B [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#:~:text=estimat...
To be fair. Healthcare.gov is a lot more complicated. And has to integrate with marketplaces in all 50 states
Magnitude is also important. If you overpay by 100% on a stick of gum that's bad deal but I likely to have any large consequences for you. But if you overpay for your house by 100% you're probably in a world of pain
CGI is a terrible company known for going over budget and under delivering on a ton of projects. Not that many companies bidding on large government contracts unfortunately
I worked there for 3 years as a graduate and I can absolutely agree with this comment, the guilt of knowing my project (which was a failure from start to finish) was funded by taxpayer money drove me away from the company and made me swear to never work at another big consultancy again.
Just the standard procurement. It's all about risk calculation. Award the contract to a branded company, because they tell you that no one got fired for buying IBM. From PwC side, "we already got the work, now just do the minimal thing to finish off the ceremony. Keep it crap and keep the work coming". Work comes back to you not because you have been delivering great products, but because they got locked into brand names and the mess that was created.
They could have used their AI skills to vibe code this for a few quid :)
This has all the hallmarks of AI slop. Upsetting :/
When I checked the site this morning, the first impression I had was: They could have just linked to deeplearning[.]ai and that would have been much better.
and that's before knowing about the £4M
Better yet, a link to Kaggle and provide prize funding for a few dozen competitions with most of them open to UK residents only. Directly incentivise the most driven types of people to compete and learn and give local firms a way to identify talent.
But I guess donating another £4MM to PwC is more sensible.
Follow the money and see who bribed who to get this ;). The website is made by PWC consultant in 1/2h with chatgpt.
I think most of the cost is for handling and collaborating with the government org. As an engineer who worked with Gov orgs before, I can say it is not easy; imagine how many levels of approvals were given to put that site online.
Not many by the looks of the site
"...while £4 million is admittedly chump change for the UK government..."
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.
someones got a new Bentley for sure and some expensive wallpaper from John Lewis...it is a shame that a country like the UK doesn't have a frontier lab and a frontier model
It would be great to see the cost breakdown. 4m might seem a lot or not dependending on what was delivered
This effort is utterly dreadful.
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!
Just log in and see the courses. There are many, and some really good ones.
Pretty sure there's some kickbacks involved.
oh, so they got a better deal than usual...
Easy to be angry but I won't comment until I see what exactly was delivered. These projects often have a lot of extra.
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.
The full details of the tender are available from https://ukri.delta-esourcing.com/delta/respondToList.html?ac...
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.
What is funny is that I know plenty of great engineers that won't earn $4mil ever in their life. For that amount of money you could give 4 guys $1mil each to create an amazing resource and take care of it for the next 30 years. I wonder how much PwC will charge for ongoing hosting and maintenance.
The UK government want to write a cheque with our money for "Digital ID" whatever nebulous Tax + Services + Tracking that is... they can't even control costs on a tiny website, what is the cost of an everything site? Infinite pounds? Imagine what even a basic v1 spec for that looks like, it would probably never even be released.
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.
Test, track, and trace.
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)."
The statistic of £29bn was taken from this article https://fullfact.org/online/37-billion-test-and-trace-app-sc...
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.
I could have sworn your comment originally said "track and trace" not "test and trace". Perhaps not enough coffee.
>Do better.
Feels so timely. May we all aspire to such a simple goal.
"The software writes itself" and you're still spending £4.1M on a website? Website on nothing other than AI itself?
At my last company (a telco that was government previously) they wound up paying $3 million for barely more than a Drupal theme for the public website.
Fun project to be on. We played “descope” bingo… but everyone won all the time.
what was the barely more?
A few embedded pages, a few login screen that redirected to other things. Less than a days work for any front end dev (I did it)
Consulting firms are a scam
Wait until they see the annual bill to maintain it..
Australian Bureau of Meteorology: hold my beer
So, it's not just my country who engages in blatant corruption like this!
This is absolutely infuriating.
Eh, here in Australia we spent 96 million on the front end of a weather website. Estimated at $4 million originally.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology...
This budget included a full modernization of their infrastructure as well as the website redesign. It's still heaps of money - but the media saying "a website cost $96 million AUD" is misleading.
I'd sort of expect them to replace every radar they had for that kind of money.
It's very simple: if you're not spending your own money, so what?
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.
To Mahad and people who share the same mindset: If "Do better" the worst you can say at the end of an essay, you made yourself inconsequential. Nothing will change, except everyone in the world starts mocking you for being so weak and agreeable in the face of people who in turn care exactly nothing about you and see you merely as an object to be exploited.
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.
If it does upskill 10 million people just a tiny amount, £4.1 million is incredibly cheap.
At one point in time the price of things was related mostly to their cost, not to some hand-wavy produced value.
It's not perfect, but this is the point of tender.
No it's not, that's what happens when people can spend someone else's money without consequences, potentially by asking a friend what they need. That happens everywhere, all the time, but let's not pretend this is economically efficient or acceptable.
If the request for proposal had been done fairly, that page would have cost a few tens of thousands.
It helps to read the linked article before commenting.
Just because you read an article, doesn't mean you have to agree with it. (Yes, I read the entire article before I commented.)
The regime is counting on you.
“If” is absolutely staggering under the heavy lifting it’s doing there.
This will have as much effect as a gnat’s fart.
Clearly the site is intended for a few mega-employers to push out as "training". How many employees do you think need to take the training to recoup £4.1 million in GDP? Not many.
Terrible take. Would you be up for paying for groceries based on "value" you get?