Government appointed consultants for Birmingham Council run up £280,000 bill in three months

by DistastefulSideboob_

17 comments

  1. I gave up after the first paragraph. Is there a better article on it because this one was just loaded with bias from the get go. It was a chore to get through the first bit.

  3. As a consultant myself (mainly work in private sector and not government comtracts) I prefer to prolong the problem and make it more complicated than it is so I get paid more. This is how most people are in the last few contracts I have done.

  4. Sent by Gove, as “Value COMMISSIONer”. My guess is that they will report that the gov is spending too much money on consultants ! 

  5. As a Brummie and someone who has paid at least minimal attention to how the Tory government operates I am Shocked! Shocked! That more money is being pissed away and a government appointed private sector firm is again treating the tax payers as a cash cow

  6. If there’s money to be saved from spending on services you can guarantee that cuntsultants appointed by this govt will spend more money to fix it.

    Their only way to level up is level everything.

  7. Those consultants need to give that public money back. End of.

  8. Let’s get this job done quickly and save the client some money. Said no consultant ever.

  9. Of course they do. When you pay someone at the rate of £100 and hour this nonsense happens.

    Poor management, and waste of tax payers money.

  10. Remember IR35 which basically killed the contracting industry to the benefit of consultancies charging inflated prices….

  11. So the government hired some consultants to work on IT implementations etc?

    Oh no! ‘Potential’ 200k with maybe some mild misspending on tech and infrastructure professionals.

    Bet they’ve got 15 diversity officers in Birmingham on 50k each that Reddit won’t worry about.

  12. now we just need more consultants to consult the consultants

  13. Pah, rookie numbers.

    Shropshire Council are paying over £6 million to PwC. The council are also cutting 300 jobs.

    The consulting companies must be laughing their socks off at these clowns.

  14. So 280k over 3 mths. For easy maths, say £100k month with 20 working days, so £5k a day. Given a consultant is probably 1.5-2k a day, basically that’s a team of 3 people for 3 mths. It’s hardly an army. Consultants are expensive, but they exist for a reason.

  15. John Coughlan (CBE) is also commissioner for SEND in Birmingham at the same time, which is failing children as badly as everywhere else. His salary from a similar role elsewhere in 2021 was £224k.

    He can claim up to 150 days a year at £1,100/day as consultant, which is another £165k.

    When no services are being properly delivered and council tax is going up more than 20% over the next two years, it seems hard to argue that anyone in these roles could be worth more than 10x the median wage.

  16. We have a family friend who worked within Birmingham Council, it wasn’t exactly a secret that they were wasting a crazy amount of money. This was like two years ago too.

  17. State ownership would solve this problem and the fat pigs of capitalism would go hungry

Leave a Reply