It wasn’t a surprise that in a rare moment of political consensus in the run-up to the 2024 general election, both Labour and the Conservatives pledged to halve spending on consultants.
But what has gone wrong? The most obvious answer is that the sector is not offering the value they want. Fundamentally, it seems that there is a lack of real-world expertise to advise on many of the areas they are consulting on.
And yet, it remains true that expert advice and good counsel are critical to government work. Moreover, governments recognise this – as evidenced by the creation of an in-house consultancy arm staffed by civil servants during the last Parliament. But the Crown Consultancy, as it was dubbed, was closed in January 2023, owing to difficulties in replicating the range of expertise offered by external advisors.
Good expert advice, it seems, is hard to come by.
So where to go from here?
It’s clear there is a need for expertise and knowledge, particularly with governments facing a multitude of increasingly complex challenges – from rising health and care costs for ageing populations to the need for green solutions in the drive to net zero. And these challenges cannot be met without the contribution of the private sector, a fact the government also recognises – see how the new National Wealth Fund aims to funnel public and private sector funding towards key projects and clean energy infrastructure.
What isn’t working is the old model of providing counsel to government. Without the real-world operational experience of what it is to run a service, advice is often confined to the ‘theoretical’.
This is especially important given public services are themselves on the brink of a revolution: the deployment of generative AI, already widespread in the UK public sector, is improving productivity and cutting bureaucracy. But here again, imagining AI as the panacea to all our woes lacks understanding of how things operate in the real world, and risk botching the implementation of a powerful new tool.
Fundamentally, what cannot be replaced is the expertise and the insights of the people who know frontline operations, who can and have been proven to deliver time and again. It is these insights which must inform governments as they look to better our public services, and therein lies an opportunity.
That’s why it is time for a reinvention of the advisory world: with the new government pledging to repair the UK’s public services, it will need the very best expertise that is on offer, but only if the advisory industry is itself able to adapt.
Huge PowerPoints for six-figure fees, explaining in various diagrams the solutions to all ills just won’t cut it anymore. It’s why the future belongs to a new type of advisor. One where real-world insights, gleaned from the experience of running services matters above all else.
Such an advisory firm might just be what government needs to usher in a new era of public services, delivered jointly in partnership between the public and private sectors.
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