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!
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://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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
This is the state the world is at.
Scammers are winners.
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.
if something is outrageous like this it's likely to come under the attention of someone who can raise the issue.
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
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.
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).
Looks like it is based on invisioncommunity. It is not even a bespoke website.
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.
Pretty sure there's some kickbacks involved.
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?
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
Follow the money and see who bribed who to get this ;). The website is made by PWC consultant in 1/2h with chatgpt.
They could have used their AI skills to vibe code this for a few dollars. :)
This has all the hallmarks of AI slop. Upsetting :/
This is absolutely infuriating.
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.
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!
oh, so they got a better deal than usual...
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?