British government departments spent over £2.6 billion on consultancy services in the 2022-23 financial year, according to official procurement data. This staggering figure represents more than the entire budget of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, yet it buys nothing tangible—no hospitals, no schools, no infrastructure. Instead, it purchases something the government already employs nearly 500,000 civil servants to provide: the ability to think.
The consultant addiction plaguing Whitehall represents one of the most perverse wastes of public money in modern British politics. Departments that employ armies of policy specialists, analysts, and advisers routinely shell out millions to firms like McKinsey, Deloitte, and KPMG to tell them what they should already know. This isn't efficiency—it's the institutionalisation of governmental incompetence.
The Scale of the Problem
The numbers tell a damning story. The Cabinet Office alone spent £290 million on consultants in 2022-23, while the Department of Health and Social Care handed over £180 million. The Ministry of Defence, despite employing thousands of strategic planners, paid consultants £150 million for advice on everything from procurement reform to digital transformation.
These aren't one-off emergency expenditures during crises. They represent routine operational spending that has become embedded in how government functions. When the Department for Work and Pensions pays consultants £50 million annually while struggling to process benefit claims efficiently, something has gone fundamentally wrong with public administration.
The most galling aspect is the revolving door between consulting firms and senior government positions. Former permanent secretaries join McKinsey as senior partners, then return to advise their former departments as external consultants. The conflicts of interest are obvious, but the financial incentives ensure the cycle continues.
The Competence Crisis
This consultant dependency exposes a deeper problem: the hollowing out of in-house expertise across Whitehall. Departments that once prided themselves on policy development capability now reflexively outsource strategic thinking to external firms. The result is a civil service that can implement decisions but struggles to make them.
Consider the Department for Business and Trade's reliance on consultants for trade policy analysis. This is supposedly the department's core function, yet it regularly pays external firms hundreds of thousands of pounds for insights into markets and regulations that its own trade specialists should understand intimately. The same pattern repeats across government: departments outsourcing their primary responsibilities to consultants who charge premium rates for work that should be routine.
The Treasury, which should be the government's centre of analytical excellence, spent £45 million on consultants in 2022-23. This is the department responsible for economic policy, yet it apparently needs external help to understand the implications of its own decisions. The irony would be amusing if the consequences weren't so serious.
The McKinsey Model
McKinsey & Company exemplifies everything wrong with the consultant industrial complex. The firm has received over £600 million from the British government since 2010, yet its track record is littered with expensive failures and questionable advice. From NHS reorganisations that increased costs while reducing efficiency to digital transformation projects that delivered neither digital nor transformation, McKinsey's recommendations consistently prioritise complexity over effectiveness.
Photo: McKinsey & Company, via openwell.co
The firm's business model depends on creating dependency. Consultants arrive with impressive presentations and management jargon, identify problems that require ongoing intervention, then propose solutions that necessitate further consultation. It's a perpetual motion machine powered by public money and governmental insecurity.
Most perniciously, McKinsey and its competitors have convinced senior civil servants that external validation is necessary for credible policy-making. This mentality has infected the entire system, creating a culture where internal expertise is automatically suspect while external consultants are presumed authoritative.
The Accountability Vacuum
Unlike civil servants, consultants face no meaningful accountability for failed recommendations. When a major policy initiative collapses after expensive consultant involvement, the firms simply move on to the next contract while departments are left to manage the consequences. The lack of long-term responsibility creates perverse incentives where consultants can propose ambitious but unrealistic solutions without bearing the costs of failure.
The procurement process itself is designed to favour large consultancy firms over genuine expertise. Complex bidding requirements and framework agreements create barriers that exclude smaller, more specialised advisers who might provide better value. The result is a market dominated by a handful of global firms that excel at winning contracts rather than delivering results.
International Comparisons
Other developed democracies manage to govern without such heavy reliance on external consultants. The French civil service maintains strong in-house analytical capabilities across all major departments. German federal ministries employ technical specialists who provide ongoing policy advice without the need for constant external validation.
Even the United States, despite its complex federal bureaucracy, spends proportionally less on consultants relative to the size of government. The difference isn't capability—it's culture. American federal agencies maintain confidence in their internal expertise, while British departments have been conditioned to doubt their own competence.
The Reform Imperative
Breaking the consultant addiction requires both structural reform and cultural change. Departments need clear limits on consultant spending, with exceptions requiring ministerial approval and public justification. The revolving door between consultancy firms and senior government positions should be restricted through mandatory cooling-off periods.
More fundamentally, the civil service needs to rebuild its confidence in internal expertise. This means investing in training and development for existing staff while recruiting specialists who can provide ongoing policy advice. The money currently wasted on consultants could fund significant improvements to in-house capability.
Government should also reform procurement rules to favour smaller, specialist advisers over large consultancy firms when external input is genuinely necessary. Breaking up the oligopoly that currently dominates government consulting would improve both quality and value for money.
The Democratic Deficit
The consultant culture represents more than financial waste—it undermines democratic accountability. When major policy decisions are effectively outsourced to unelected consultants, the chain of responsibility between voters and government becomes dangerously attenuated. Ministers can blame consultants for failures while consultants can claim they only provided advice.
This accountability deficit is particularly problematic given the ideological homogeneity of major consultancy firms. McKinsey, Deloitte, and their competitors share similar worldviews that often align with fashionable management theories rather than practical governance needs. When government policy is shaped by consultant groupthink, democratic choice becomes largely meaningless.
The Bottom Line
Britain cannot afford to continue funding a shadow civil service of highly paid consultants while the actual civil service atrophies through neglect and under-confidence. The current system delivers the worst of both worlds: high costs and poor outcomes, wrapped in the language of efficiency and expertise.
Taxpayers deserve a government that can think for itself, make decisions based on in-house expertise, and take responsibility for the consequences. Until departments wean themselves off their consultant addiction, British governance will remain expensive, ineffective, and fundamentally unaccountable.
A government that cannot govern without external consultants is not governing at all—it's just managing the decline of its own competence.
