In-house government consultants won’t solve underlying civil service problems

The Cabinet Office minister Lord Agnew has plans for a team of in-house advisers in the Cabinet Office, apparently to be called the “Crown Consultancy”. He believes that over-use of consultants “infantilises civil servants” as well as wasting money.

The news will cause less excitement than the launch of series four of its Netflix near-namesake. But there is more interest than usual in this routine bit of government housekeeping. That is partly due to the current focus on all matters related to the civil service, but also because this is one of the ways the government plans to reduce the huge sums it has been spending on external consultancy contracts, which cost taxpayers nearly £1bn last year alone, and will since have risen further.

A ‘crown consultancy’ could be a sensible evolution of past central units in government

There is something contradictory about “in house” consultants. But what the government wants to do is build up a central team with particular consultancy-style skills that can be deployed across government departments. What those skills are is unclear, but we assume they include the project management, data analysis and problem-solving attributes that management consultants present as part of their offer.

Such plans are not entirely new. Strategy and delivery units working for the prime minister have often been part of No10 and the Cabinet Office, with a fairly good record of success. But these were small elite teams generating ideas and holding departments to account for implementing prime ministerial priorities. They were not designed to be farmed out consultancy-style to parts of government that needed particular skills or capacity.

This latest effort seems more like successive attempts within departments to create pools of people who could be deployed to rapidly resource ministerial priorities or troubleshoot work programmes heading off course. These “flexible resource” teams often foundered because they were too small to really provide proper additional support, or because permanent secretaries could not justify keeping a large stock of permanent civil servants on hand and idling. They tended to be kept busy with useful work, which then made it just as hard to redeploy them as any other civil servant.

An in-house team of government consultants must be more than a team of fast-stream graduates

Previous experiments offer lessons for the new Cabinet Office team:

• it needs to be big enough to offer genuine support to priority departmental programmes, not superficial fig-leaf gestures;
• its managers need to be ruthless about deciding where resource is to be deployed and ending support when it is no longer needed, making the most of their power to decide between competing priorities;
• there should be as much focus on building up the skills of departmental civil servants as on providing a service; and
• the Cabinet Office needs to be ready to accept the overheads and fallow periods of a genuine consultancy model.

The leaders of the new team also need to invest in training for their proto-consultants. It is not clear how the group will be different from the fast stream graduate trainee programme where talented officials at the beginning of their careers are distributed throughout government. A tight focus on project management and building expertise in data interpretation and application will be more important than snazzy PowerPoint skills. Indeed, if consultancy-style skills are needed they should already be part of the existing fast stream development programme.

If the government is serious about the Crown Consultancy succeeding, it should be ambitious. The model should not be micro-units in the centre, but more like the Government Legal Department or Government Digital Service. These are substantial functions, effectively departments in their own right, that have a clearly defined remit and a crisp and useful offer to the rest of government.

In-house consultants will not solve underlying problems in the civil service

A team made up of a mix of talented and well-trained fast streamers, more grizzled veterans of policy and implementation programmes, external hires and people with in-demand specialist skills could make a welcome difference to the success of top government priorities. But on its own it will only make a small dent in the money the government is spending on external help. A new internal consultancy function will not address the critical problem the civil service faces, and which ministers and permanent secretaries have turned to consultants to help solve, which is a more systemic lack of skilled capacity.

Any in-house consultancy function, however well developed, will be a drop in the ocean compared to the resources needed to tackle Brexit fallout and the rolling coronavirus crisis. Those must come from redeploying existing civil servants and bringing in talented new recruits. And the real gap is of subject-specialist experts who can advise on and implement these highly technical challenges. Whether it is the implementation of the Northern Ireland protocol, the administration of a test and trace system or the negotiation of a trade deal, expertise built up over time in central, devolved and local government is what will help ministers make good on their plans.

Even then, the government will still need to engage consultants for certain tasks – where it is not worth retaining in-house civil service skills, or in some cases for external assurance. Here the government should get better at managing contracts, as we have argued. That is where costs can best be brought down.

The government is right to focus on civil service reform more widely. Developing and entrenching the skills civil servants need and building up capacity where it is required is hard and slow work but will save far more money and equip the state more effectively than a useful but limited team in the centre of government.