Management consultancies cash in £180m for Brexit planning
Management consultancies have been awarded more than £180m to deliver Brexit, as the government faces mounting criticism for handing out taxpayer cash to private firms during the pandemic.
Documents released yesterday showed the government has signed six Brexit contracts each worth £30m with KPMG, McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte, Accenture and PwC.
Ministers said the £180m sum was to “support the successful delivery of the UK’s economic and political independence, including relationships with the EU and the rest of the world.”
While consultants “may be placed in any government department”, their assistance will be focused on immigration, international trade, food agriculture, animal welfare and healthcare supply chains, according to the contracts.
The government has already spent £88m over the past two years on Brexit advice. However, it yesterday warned that existing deals were expiring “and there is sufficient demand that this arrangement should be replaced, with a similar and improved arrangement”.
EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier is currently in London attempting to hammer out a last-minute trade deal with the UK, ahead of Britain’s formal exit from the bloc on 31 December.
Deloitte has already reaped more than £13m from the government for Brexit planning over the past two years, while Bain has cashed in more than £10m.
It comes as ministers face increasing scrutiny over the government’s dependence on management consultancies during the coronavirus crisis.
England’s Test and Trace system, which has been met with fierce criticism for its low success rate, has seen the government hand out taxpayer cash to 1,114 Deloitte consultants alone.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has called the figure “scandalous”.
The Labour MP today said: “This is scandalous. On what planet is that a competent or prudent approach?”
Meanwhile, senior-ranking consultants at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) are being paid around £7,000 a day for their help with the government’s response to Covid-19, amounting to individual salaries of almost £1.5m a year.
The government has also faced scrutiny over its awarding of more than £13.8bn in PPE contracts since the outbreak of the pandemic, after multiple firms handed deals were found to have no experience handling PPE.
Meg Hillier, chair of the Commons’ public accounts committee, said: “Consultancy work on very specialist technical issues can have a place but we have a tendency to pass work over to highly paid consultants as a first choice too often.”
A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “As a responsible government we have, and will continue to, draw on the expert advice of a range of specialists to prepare for the changes and opportunities that will come from the end of the transition period.”
Tamzen Isacsson, chief executive of the Management Consultancies Association, told City A.M: “Brexit has created an unprecedented workload for the UK government with the need to set up and plan new systems to cover border control, trade, agricultural policy and immigration as well as many other complex policy areas.
“The consultancy sector has supported the UK in these efforts, providing vital skills, extra capacity and insight and experience from all economic sectors as well as innovative ways of working.”