Plundering the Public Sector [Paperback]

David Craig (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 2006

In their crusade to modernise public services, New Labour are giving vast amounts of taxpayers' money to management and IT systems consultants. They are everywhere - the Inland Revenue, MoD, Education Department, NHS and Downing Street. But are these management wizards giving us schools and hospitals that will be the envy of the world, or are they just siphoning off billions that should have been spent on the frontline services? And the biggest and most expensive consulting catastrophe of them all may still be yet to come - up to GBP 30 billion taken out of patient care to pay for the new NHS computer system. Isn't it time to ask how our money is really being spent?

Editorial Reviews

Review

"'Gordon Brown and Tony Blair should invite Craig into Whitehall to reveal the many and ingenious ways in which taxpayers have been compelled to provide welfare for the wealthy.' Nick Cohen, Observer"

About the Author

David Craig has been a consultant for twenty years, working for and competing against some of the world's best and worst management consultants. His book Rip-off!: The scandalous inside story of the management consulting money machine was a business bestseller. Richard Brooks spent fifteen years as a Career Civil Servant before joining Private Eye as a journalist.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Robinson Publishing M/D (May 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1845293746
• ISBN-13: 978-1845293741
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,749,269 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant account of privatisation rip-offs in Britain, September 6, 2006

By 

William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Plundering the Public Sector (Paperback)

David Craig, a management consultant with 20 years' experience, has written this outstanding book together with Richard Brooks, a tax inspector for 16 years and now a journalist. They show how the Blair government helps consultants to loot and wreck our public services and take our hard-earned tax money. This relationship is increasingly corrupt, as the authors show in their detailed account of the government's relations with accountancy firm Arthur Andersen.

Consultancy is basically a rip-off. As a recent book, `Business Consulting' by Toppin and Czerniawska, admitted, "$200 billion a year is spent on business consulting, much of it ineffectively." Yet the Blair government has given £70 billion to these useless mercenaries to `modernise' our public services. Between 1997 and 2004, public sector productivity fell by 10%, while spending on consultants rose by seven times.

PFI and PPP have both meant giving huge sums of public money to private contractors. By the end of 2005, the government had signed PFI contracts worth £50 billion, which committed us taxpayers to paying consultancies £7.5 billion every year for the next 20 years - £150 billion overall.

The government has wasted billions on worthless IT systems, for example £50 billion on the NHS's Connecting for Health programme and £19 billion on ID cards. An all-party committee said that the government's record on IT consulting projects was "an appalling waste of public money which Whitehall was trying to conceal behind a cloak of commercial confidentiality."

These consultants' projects are almost always over budget and over schedule. They produce only administrative chaos and huge increases in management costs, leading to cuts in services. In our NHS, they have closed wards, sacked staff and cancelled operations. Three quarters of hospitals are cutting patient care due to budget constraints, while shareholders in the early PFI hospital schemes got returns of over 100%. Consultants have also damaged the Criminal Records Bureau, Customs & Excise, the Child Support Agency, the Passport Office, Inland Revenue tax credits, National Air Traffic Services and local government. The Department for Work and Pensions has just scrapped a new computer system which was supposed to streamline benefits payments, at a cost to the taxpayer of £141 million.

The government hired the accountants KPMG to review tax havens in British overseas dependencies, just before a US Senate Financial Committee exposed KPMG's involvement in `the largest criminal tax fraud in history'. The MoD spent several hundred millions on PricewaterhouseCoopers and £53 million on McKinsey, yet the Public Accounts Committee reported that its "cost overruns in 2003 and 2004 are worse than at any time in the last decade."

Consultancy journals crowed, "Consultancy fees have risen to their highest level", and "Consultants toast feast of work from Whitehall." A management consultant advised his fellows to vote Labour because "Labour have been reasonably consultant-friendly." Why do we allow these massive subsidies to a failed system?

On the book's cover the publishers quote Nick Cohen of the Observer, "Gordon Brown and Tony Blair should invite Craig into Whitehall to reveal the many ingenious ways taxpayers are being compelled to provide welfare for the wealthy." But Brown and Blair do know the effects of their policies. The problem is not their ignorance, but our unwillingness to act against a system which plunders the many to enrich the few.