Interesting report in yesterday’s Guardian.

The annual bill for Whitehall consultants advising government departments is running at more than £2.2bn, an investigation by the Guardian reveals today…

One reason for this is that New Labour ideology includes a naive assumption that ‘business’ methods are invariably superior to old-style ‘public-service’ methods. The problem is that nobody in the Labour leadership knows anything about business because they’ve never run one. And (poor saps) they think that consultantcy firms do. The Guardian report claims that one section of the Department of Health is now staffed by almost as many consultants as full-time officials – 180 civil servants and 170 consultants.