New research reveals sea change in staffing of public sector reforms projects

Difficulty in finding staff with a combination of business management skills and public sector experience is driving a sea change in the staffing of public service reform projects, according to one of the leading recruitment companies in the area. Woodhurst, the management consultancy recruitment specialist formerly known as Huntswood, believes the impact on Britain’s public services could be profound.

Keith Mackenzie, Head of Operations at Woodhurst’s search and selection division, explained:
The public sector has always insisted on using consulting firms that have worked in the area before. While this policy remains unchanged, the recent explosion of government consultancy projects means demand for consultants with public sector experience now significantly outstrips supply. Consultants who have only ever worked for private companies are now reforming the Civil Service and the NHS, and they are a very different breed to those traditionally involved. Some of them are really shaking things up and it will be interesting to see where this leads.

The Government is the UK’s largest buyer of management consultancy, having doubled its expenditure last year to over 3 million* a day. According to research by Woodhurst, job vacancies for management consultants to work on government projects have increased 43-fold over the last two years and now account for a fifth of all management consultancy vacancies. With only 6% of consultants having previous public sector experience, public sector reform projects are now overwhelmingly being staffed by people who have never worked with the public sector before.

The scale and range of public projects on which these consultants are providing management know-how is substantial. Among the biggest are contracts for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Transport for London (TfL), the Inland Revenue and the NHS.

Keith Mackenzie continued:
The consulting firms are bringing in consultants with appropriate functional experience but who usually work in areas such as financial services, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications. They are untouched by the public-sector culture and, compared to those traditionally involved, are inclined to take a much more commercial and often radical approach to introducing new processes, management structures and ways of working. Whether this will lead to rapid gains in efficiency and service quality or increased internal resistance to change remains to be seen. It’s very much a case of ’watch this space’