It’s not “ideological mistrust of the public sector.” It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.
FDR, who can hardly be accused of distrusting the public sector, emphasized the importance of public control over government sector salaries: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/unions
Consultancies don’t appear to be subject to market forces either, judging by their complete dearth of talent and expertise.
In other words, “rent seeking”.
The only protection against pilfering of the public coffers appears to be strong cultural opposition to it, so exactly the opposite of what’s happening in the US, for example.
this is absolutely true. I can spin up a government consultancy and get inside the system so that I can low bid contracts, get extensions and not provide any meaningful service at all, that's a comfortable parasitic life. I worked in the US Dod and there was no meaningful quality difference between the 2x salary contractors with their additional 2x overhead than the lifers.
we can bemoan that the government isn't being efficient, but involving people with even less oversight whose only goal is to extract as much from the public coffer as possible is not a magic bullet that gets the public more for their money.
Market forces aren’t the only appropriate form of external control. That’s why we have pay scales for government workers legislated by Congress. But OP said that’s driven by ideological mistrust of the government too.
And your second point is wrong too. See Scandinavia for places that both have a deep trust in the public sector and also deeply believe in markets and market forces.
> It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.
They are subject to the same market forces though. It's this exact thing that's killing government competency; the pay scales are set lower for a role in the government than at other corporations so qualified candidates do not apply to the government.
Ex. Google's annual revenue is ~400 B and it's CEO makes ~200 M/yr while USA's annual reveune is ~5,000 B and Trump makes ~0.4 M/yr.
Ex. Google's board members make ~500 k/yr while congress critters make < 150 k/yr
But also the GS-15 caps out around 200k which means that the best you're going to make in the USG is worse than an entry level employee at Google.
They absolutely are subject to market forces — the labour market.
Try hiring 100 software developers at civil service rates. You’ll get maybe 10 very talented people who are in it for “the mission” or for other ideological reasons, and about 90 who would be unemployable anywhere else.
And that’s after you’ve already excluded 95% of the market with citizenship and location requirements, suitability to hold a security clearance etc.
France is a very bad example if you're gonna talk about State corruption (and taking insane amounts of public money into private pockets) and FLOSS maintenance. There's very isolated cases of public services producing free-software, but that's a drop in the ocean compared to the billions siphoned out of our pockets for Microsoft, Palantir, or other profoundly-incapable consultancies such as Atos, Bull, Thales, McKinsey.
That happens at literally every company I contract with (that requires I use their equipment). At my current gig I couldn't start until they had a laptop for me, and then it took another month to access to the code. Every year they auto delete contractor credentials, unless the director in charge of your contract says no. One year he missed the email and I found myself without access to the code for days while I was reinstated. Only I wasn't completely reinstated, I had been deleted from one of their systems, so I couldn't log into some systems for multiple weeks, until I got a new PKIM card, since a new card was the only way to add credentials to the right system.
So please, it's never been accurate to say the government is mismanaged while corporations aren't. The same things happens in bureaucracies of similar size.
I work in a bureaucracy of similar size and could never imagine something like that happening where I work.
Corporations might be mismanaged, but ultimately they have a variety of price signals they must be responsive to or die. No such thing among the feds and it shows.
> £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good
actually kind of makes sense. The £600 a day is as long as you need it and can be stopped when you don't. A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.
Thing is, if you are a good developer/architect, you have lots of options to make this elsewhere. £100k is not a very high salary in London.
Most of the GDS crowd (who were good), left to go elsewhere due to boredom/frustration.
The cost of not having good staff is very high to government. DEFRA were recently hiring senior enterprise architects on £70k. They could burn a lot of money (millions) on poor technical decision making but somehow saving 30-50k is the priority.
> A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.
Sounds like we really need to rethink this massive perk about government jobs. Having a class of people with guaranteed employed for life with no accountability on performance or value they add, always seemed absolutely insane to me.
I'm pretty sure they're "employed for life" because otherwise every new administration would replace as many people as possible.
Can you picture a company replacing 90% of their workforce every 4 or 8 years, all at once? Because that's what I think would happen if government employees could be fired as easily.
I don't know much about the UK, but it's really common here in France for public servants to be fired. Including for very wrong reasons such as being unionized. The accountability problem lies with the managers imposing meaningless KPIs (even in life-threatening scenarios such as hospitals and police stations) and high-level politicians who are parasites sucking off public money to destroy public services and give it all to their private-company friends who are going to employ them for very high salaries right after they leave the public service, a practice known as pantouflage.
Just wandering in to this as a relative political bystander, but as I look at the polling out of the UK [0] I see that the party currently leading is some group called "REF" and I gather they did pretty well in the latest round of elections. I assume they're an old-established party who represent the deep contentment the British have with how the public service has been run.
I suppose they do seem a little unpopular, they aren't breaking 30% but they seem relatively popular compared to the more fringe groups like, say, LAB and CON. Have they, in what I assume is decades of stable political governance, made any mistakes that might have engendered this ideological distrust in how well the political system is managed?
While you've clearly mastered the tone of supercilious sarcasm that is the mainstay of British politics, I should point out to the audience that the Farage party is entirely the billionaire and foreign propaganda party, which is why they are successful.
So, in a moment of clarification, your official position on this one is going to be that the 2 majors are at high risk of being knocked into 3rd/4th place by the greens, and this isn't a reflection on their failures of governance over the decades?
I'm not actually sure what you're proposing you think the major reasons are, since that article is just a reminder that people with money have noticed what a disaster the EU is too, not just average voters.
> While you've clearly mastered the tone of supercilious sarcasm that is the mainstay of British politics...
I will admit a feeling of loss that I couldn't work in "unstained escutcheon" but that would be too obscure a reference. I doubt Rees-Mogg would have baulked.
> Meanwhile, at least eight of their councilors elected last week have quit already due to comedy levels of misconduct.
And a supplementary question - do you feel this is "ideological mistrust of the public sector" coming through? Or is it something else when you do it?
FDR, who can hardly be accused of distrusting the public sector, emphasized the importance of public control over government sector salaries: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/unions