UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M
mahadk.com285 points by JustSkyfall 6 hours ago
285 points by JustSkyfall 6 hours ago
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.
I think you're being a little unfair to the civil servant who has to follow the law regarding procurement.
I once knew someone who had to solicit 3 bids and document them to buy a $500 camera for local government. They weren't thinking "I am useless and craven", they were thinking "this is silly but I have to do it".
For a government contract we budgeted somewhere between 50k and 100k to change a deployment script.
I was against it, but "you know, if they don't do it, they no longer give a warranty on the solution", type of bullshit. Yeah 60md of warranty? My client are a bunch of fools.
Like ONG, bribes and extracting public money is the first target.
Screenshot of the top 3 results on Google shopping ought to do it
And even if doesn't, writing five online shops to send you a written offer takes a couple minutes and results in the same or lower prices
Procurement for such small items can be quick and sane. It's the larger items where rules tighten and procurement portals or bidding become mandated that are problematic
> 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.
This is an absurd statement that might as well come straight out of Yes Minister. Buying from PWC reflects badly on them already, let alone when their next scandal happens. Which is of course never far away [0].
I'm sure Fujitsu met similar "criteria" when selected for Horizon. How well that selection reflected on the procurement office..
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.
Iso that everyone is certified but nobody can truly explain or follow, ensuring the money is extracted to the same bunch of bidders.
I wrote a relevant article on this last year "On-Time and Under-Budget. Where some IT projects are Probably Going Wrong." [https://rodyne.com/?p=2074]
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.
I’m reading the original tender and there is zero mention of ISO 9000. In fact, the tendering authority even specifically stated this opportunity was a good fit for SMEs.
Where does all this talk of standards come from?
If this was a good fit for SME, and the price paid for the whole thing was 4M pounds, why didn’t any SME win the tender? Seriously, that’s the whole yearly turnover for most SME shops I ever worked at. And all of them could do a better job than this.
That's possibly why: small businesses reliant on contracts that are, to them, disproportionately huge.. well, they die at the end of the contract. HMRC killed off an OpenStack based AWS competitor by replacing them, about ten years ago. Anchor clients can be a real hazard if an SME can't live without them. Sometimes it just isn't worth it.
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?
My father was a ISO9000 and ISO9001 certification consultant for over 10 years. He taught at Cal Poly Pamona, near the end of that era. This was my first exposure to using the familiar terms seen in RFCs like MUST MAY SHALL, etc.
Ever tried to write a quality based document describing how to create an air filled, japanese oragami balloon? (step 3 is the first big hurdle, https://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Origami-Balloon). That was his goto starter for ISO classes.
> 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?
ISO standards don't ensure this, since certification is only based on verifying documentation format. What the ISO processes do tend to do is create a small memo indicating that every dept should justify the work they are doing by writing it down and showing it to their boss. What that does to an organization is to produce a crapload of near-useless documentation and throw a large number of people into political hell. After that, the solution is always the same. They quickly move from everyone trying to coordinate down to a very small number of people (1-3) taking charge of moving dept to dept. Either the agents or the supervisors who are articulate enough to gloss over inconsistencies and gaps to form a coherent story, write the documentation.
While this may lend well to shoring up some companies' internals, in the early 2000s, ISO certification consultancy was a lucrative gig. It was chased as a stamp to markup pricing, rather than a quality tool.
I remember the backdated document signing parties at my previous company, the day before an ISO audit. So much fun!
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.
In unrelated news Labour quietly dropped its plans to "restructure" the audit industry last week.
I wish a fitting comeuppance upon all the grifters taking up a seat which could've been filled by someone actually interested in governance.
these are exactly the kinds of people interested in governance. That's the problem
I feel like the true scandal beneath all of these big government contracts is not necessarily the money spent, but actually how poor the services received are.
I have worked with many "big agency" developers and can tell you categorically that they are more often than not absolutely terrible at their jobs.
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!
Tangentially, Burnham has a long history with these sorts of public-sector private vampires, having been up to his neck in PFI (of "£200 to change a lightbulb" fame) in his stint leading the NHS.
eg.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/28/labour-debt-peter...
https://doctorsforthenhs.org.uk/the-truth-about-the-lies-tha...
etc
Being cynical i would say it's because Burnham could potentially challenge Starmer. Less cynically Labour has a big enough majority they can afford to lose this by election. The headache of replacing the mayor of Manchester is not worth it.
Why can't he just do both jobs? Boris did it iirc.
If memory serves, Dan Jarvis also did it, being both MP and mayor of the South Yorkshire city region or whatever it was called at the time.
It is fairly innately political. No Prime Minister has ever polled as low as Starmer and come back from it, or so is being said in the press. Burnham might be a smart electoral move, but he's not a plaything of the Labour right, so they kept him out.
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.
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
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).
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.
A lot of it is! It has been this way for a long time in some parts of the public sector, eg:
https://github.com/ministryofjustice
I don't know of a department that does it as well as MoJ, though. Caveats exist around old private sector implemented systems like the prisons and probation databases etc, which even MoJ itself doesn't own the IP for. But everything made by civil servants or contractors at MoJ ends up published in that org unless there's a good reason not to.
Edit: FOI in principle allows you to request a cut of a git repo etc for a service, so you can impose annoyance upon departments that are less open.
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.
Having worked in large corporates (and some government projects) issuing out RFPs, the final decision tends to go: let's just go with an established name like PwC even if they're more expensive (and given we have the budget approved already) as opposed to a small firm down the road that has a great portfolio, because if something goes wrong, I can say I relied on this big, proven firm, and not be criticized for using an unknown firm for such crucial work.
It's frustrating, because these larger firms most always churn out subpar work and this mindset just keeps funding it so they don't improve.
I've seen some small firms crash and burn too, though. The problem is small firms are easy-come, easy-go; they don't have enough reputation at stake. Not sure what a good solution is.
You could have contracted 5 small firms for £400k each (which, for this project seems frankly seems excessive) and even if a couple failed to deliver you'd have gotten 3 separate products to choose the best quality one from, £148k to legally chase up the firms who failed to deliver, and still had £2 million left over.
I agree a good solution isn't easy to come up with, but the status quo is certainly an outrageously awful one.
There are dozens of "small firms" with plenty of reputation at stake. Or how about a "medium-sized firm". There's quite a few, probably a few hundred-thousand, options inbetween "PWC" and "my mate's nephew studying computer science".
The large firms' reputation isn't really at stake though. They keep doing crap like this and it never harms their ability to get more contracts.
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.
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
Magnitude is also important. If you overpay by 100% on a stick of gum that's bad deal but I likely to have any large consequences for you. But if you overpay for your house by 100% you're probably in a world of pain
CGI is a terrible company known for going over budget and under delivering on a ton of projects. Not that many companies bidding on large government contracts unfortunately
UK Gov has a whole set of standards for building websites, yet it seems sites like this get to opt out of this.
Looks like it is based on invisioncommunity. It is not even a bespoke website.
Imagine charging 4 milly for what amounts to a wordpress theme + module configuration.
I get the feeling you haven’t done much government consulting. The bill has nothing to do with the actual work; it’s meetings with stakeholders after stakeholder then coming out with a plan that will please everyone.
"The software writes itself" and you're still spending £4.1M on a website?
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?
Unfortunately because the top end of the salary is limited, to get people to work on stuff they need to bring in contractors to fill out the teams for many projects.
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
Better yet, a link to Kaggle and provide prize funding for a few dozen competitions with most of them open to UK residents only. Directly incentivise the most driven types of people to compete and learn and give local firms a way to identify talent.
But I guess donating another £4MM to PwC is more sensible.
They could have used their AI skills to vibe code this for a few quid :)
Follow the money and see who bribed who to get this ;). The website is made by PWC consultant in 1/2h with chatgpt.
Pretty sure there's some kickbacks involved.
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...
>Do better.
Feels so timely. May we all aspire to such a simple goal.
At my last company (a telco that was government previously) they wound up paying $3 million for barely more than a Drupal theme for the public website.
Fun project to be on. We played “descope” bingo… but everyone won all the time.
Consulting firms are a scam
Wait until they see the annual bill to maintain it..
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.
I could have sworn your comment originally said "track and trace" not "test and trace". Perhaps not enough coffee.
This is absolutely infuriating.
Eh, here in Australia we spent 96 million on the front end of a weather website. Estimated at $4 million originally.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology...
This budget included a full modernization of their infrastructure as well as the website redesign. It's still heaps of money - but the media saying "a website cost $96 million AUD" is misleading.
I'd sort of expect them to replace every radar they had for that kind of money.
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.)
“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?