[andsoitis]

> £100k/year = bad, £120k/year

Just keep in mind that if you pay someone a salary of £100k, your expense for that employee is actually much higher. So £120k would be less expensive and you also don’t take on thr risk and cost of developing a system (you’re getting “off the shelf”).

[justin66]

Hopefully it goes without saying but the person you're responding to was just giving an example. The contractor vs. permanent employee pay gap absurdity they're highlighting in government contracting is often much more profound than 20%. 100% higher pay for contractors doing the equivalent work in the US isn't uncommon.

[philipallstar]

Pay yes, but not cost.

[justin66]

That’s just delusional.

[andsoitis]

Why do you say that? The cost to a company for an employee ranges anywhere from 120% to 200% of the compensation paid to the employee.

[selfhoster1312]

Here in France pay for IT jobs in public services is more around 20-40k€/year, while consultants brought from the private sector cost somewhere between 500-3000€/day.

Let's be very pessimistic about it (in real life it's much less), and say the public servant is gonna cost you 80k€/year. That's still at the VERY least ~50% cheaper than the 150k€/year consultant.

It's mathematically impossible for a consultancy putting money into shareholders to be more economically-efficient than a public administration. There's not a single historical example of that. Privatization of railway, energy and hospitals here in Europe was supposed to bring better service and reduce costs: it has done exactly the opposite.

[footydude]

You can also (generally) turn off the taps of the cost of the £120k/year incredibly quickly.

By comparison it is much harder (and also much more likely to generate negative newspaper headlines) to make 500 people redundant.