Age of the consultant

The revelation some Government departments have more than trebled their spending on consultants during the National-led Administration's time in office raises a number of questions about motive, efficiency and - that most beloved of terms in the lexicon of modern management - "outcomes" in the quest for a new slimmed-down public service.

The Government has made much of its determination to reduce the size and the cost of the public sector. It is within its rights to do so.

This country is spending more than it earns and needs to cut its cloth accordingly. The generalised theory for such actions is public service departments are heavy in overheads and bureaucratic in nature with structural predispositions towards inefficiency.

Further, that some government departments have over many decades established deeply embedded, insular cultures and as such are incapable of working collaboratively towards common goals with other departments, much less communicating meaningfully with them.

"Synergies", that other favoured term of the times, remains obstinately absent from their dictionaries.

However, if the cost to the public purse of reforming, rationalising and merging such recalcitrant organisations is as much as, if not more than, the status quo, and if in the process issues have arisen as to the efficacy of those much-loved "outcomes", it is time to have a closer look at exactly what is going on - and, quite possibly, to reassess.

A good case for this can be seen in the radical and far-reaching reforms mandated for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Since the publication of the controversial details of the plan put forward by chief executive John Allen, employed precisely on a modernisation ticket, and subsequent to a far-reaching backlash, there has been a rush to either backtrack or achieve a distance from the plans on the part of, among others, Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully.

It has not gone unremarked that Mfat doubled its expenditure on consultants between 2008-11, a good proportion understood to be on the overhaul, elements of which seem likely to be consigned to the dustbin.

Down the road at the Treasury, spending on consultants has risen almost six-fold between 2008, Labour's last year in charge, when it was $1.4 million, and 2011, by which time it had risen to $8 million.

Similarly, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry tripled its consultancy fees during the same period to $12.6 million.

The Ministry for the Environment eclipsed them all by spending $15.7 million in 2011 - or 33% of its budget.

It is to be expected that when the organisational architecture of such departments has to be rearranged, this is best undertaken by well-qualified outside agents; and that this will involve relatively expensive one-off costs.

But as in the case of Mfat, there can be a considerable distance between the consultant's ideal scenario and what is realistically achievable without permanently undermining or damaging the services at stake.

This is the great challenge for any far-reaching overhauls and/or mergers of public service entities: how to introduce the required efficiencies and cost-savings without critically injuring the patient; or, indeed, without establishing an infrastructure that will require ongoing, perhaps even permanent, servicing by a new breed of even more expensive public servant - the contracting consultant.

There have been suggestions, for example, that among the many hundreds if not thousands of public servants given their marching orders and redundancy cheques in restructurings that have taken place to date, there are quite a number who have been re-employed as consultants at higher wages than they were on in the first place.

But the wages bill is not the only criteria in the mix: there is the requirement to maintain a coherent and well-motivated public service workforce with career pathways that compensate for the fact they are not paid anything like the rates of consultants and which help to maintain continuity and institutional knowledge.

It is too soon to know just how far the Government intends to take public service reforms.

The requirement for some degree of reform and cost-cutting is clear.

But there are already some worrying, and perhaps unintended "side-effects", not least the huge sums being spent on peripatetic, temporarily deployed expertise.

 

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