This is pretty normal for government procurement, though. and in fact, most large organisation procurement. There's a whole wall of standards that the supplier must meet, e.g. ISO9000 that your little web-dev shop almost certainly doesn't. They won't buy from a supplier that is likely to go out of business. There's a ton of other criteria that you've got to meet to get the business. If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business. The civil servant has nothing to lose from saying "no" and runs a risk if they say "yes".
Businesses that do meet these criteria charge like wounded bulls. In part because they know that all the other businesses that the govt could turn to will also charge like wounded bulls.
I think you're being a little unfair to the civil servant who has to follow the law regarding procurement.
I once knew someone who had to solicit 3 bids and document them to buy a $500 camera for local government. They weren't thinking "I am useless and craven", they were thinking "this is silly but I have to do it".
> If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business.
This is an absurd statement that might as well come straight out of Yes Minister. Buying from PWC reflects badly on them already, let alone when their next scandal happens. Which is of course never far away [0].
I'm sure Fujitsu met similar "criteria" when selected for Horizon. How well that selection reflected on the procurement office..
I don't doubt you're correct about the incentives, but one point seems amiss...
> If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business.
You don't think that spending £4.1 million on this garbage might reflect badly on someone?
ISO9000 is, bar none, the most brilliant grift I have ever encountered. It's so simple, yet so elegant.
Step 1: Come up with an incredibly easy to meet standard (because you don't want anybody abandoning the process because it's too much of a hassle) that sounds like a reasonable requirement on paper (to make it easy to pitch as a basic requirement of doing business). Say, "Have a plan for the things you do".
Step 2: Add one additional requirement to your standard: "Prioritize Vendors that meet this standard".
Step 3: Obscure the hell out of the standard, (to not make the grift too obvious) and stick it behind a paywall.
Step 4: Franchise out the (nigh-impossible to fail) "approval" process to 3rd parties, who pay you for the privilege.
Step 5: Your first few "standardized" companies put pressure on their vendors and customers to get certified, so they hire consultants, who in turn pay you, who tell them "Good job, you meet the standard. But do your vendors?".
Step 6: Watch as the cash floods in.
(Optional, Step 7): Once a bunch of major companies are certified, target governments to do your marketing push for you.
In the past, expensive contracts like this were handed out as rewards to Tory donors. Help fund the party's re-election, and your company will receive a cushy reward. See also the Cash-for-Honours scandal, where the Labour party were also found giving preference to donors in the selection for lordships.
> Labour taking free staff from scandal-hit consulting firms
> [...] The party has quietly accepted more than £230,000 worth of free staff from ‘big four’ accounting firms PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Ernst & Young (EY) since Keir Starmer took over as leader in 2020.
Still, I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the ruling party was gifted £230k of free services from PwC, then brought a static website from PwC for £4.1 million of taxpayer money.
Interestingly, the UK PM (and allies) just blocked a would-be political rival Andy Burnham standing as an MP.
One of the given reasons is because Burnham is currently mayor of Greater Manchester, and running a new election there would cost approx £4m(!!) which is a huge waste of taxpayer money.
I was surprised that they even gave this as a faux reason since it seems like the sort of money they would spend on replenishing the water coolers, or buying bic pens, or... building a static website!
Tangentially, Burnham has a long history with these sorts of public-sector private vampires, having been up to his neck in PFI (of "£200 to change a lightbulb" fame) in his stint leading the NHS.
Being cynical i would say it's because Burnham could potentially challenge Starmer. Less cynically Labour has a big enough majority they can afford to lose this by election. The headache of replacing the mayor of Manchester is not worth it.
Why can't he just do both jobs? Boris did it iirc.
I feel like the true scandal beneath all of these big government contracts is not necessarily the money spent, but actually how poor the services received are.
I have worked with many "big agency" developers and can tell you categorically that they are more often than not absolutely terrible at their jobs.
The only way this is defensible is if they contracted out thousands of hours of custom content. Which from a quick scan they might have. If not, this is, at best, a remarkably poor outcome for the price paid.
As an american it's pretty cool to see how citizens can force representatives to debate an issue. But it's too bad even the most popular petitions just have "lol no" as the response.
There would've been an RFP for this, surely? Which means PwC was chosen to deliver this ahead of n number of other tenderers. I'd be curious to see what other proposals there were and the decision-making that went into choosing the winner.
Having worked in large corporates (and some government projects) issuing out RFPs, the final decision tends to go: let's just go with an established name like PwC even if they're more expensive (and given we have the budget approved already) as opposed to a small firm down the road that has a great portfolio, because if something goes wrong, I can say I relied on this big, proven firm, and not be criticized for using an unknown firm for such crucial work.
It's frustrating, because these larger firms most always churn out subpar work and this mindset just keeps funding it so they don't improve.
It is funny how they link out to Salesforce's Trailhead site. Personally, I think it's a cute site for learning, but have also recently come to realize how sometimes it used to have a lot of political content too. One example I can think of is they used to have lessons related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution popularized by Klaus Schwab. At some point, they retired those lessons. My guess is they were retired around the same time that Schwab had some controversial allegations surrounding him.
Anyone else surprised by how the actual training content doesn't seem to cover true fundamentals (even for a broad, non-technical audience) that would include basics like pre-training, post-training, weights, context window, etc? I get that we're all flabbergasted by the website itself, but it's not like the content is redeeming either. Here in the US, I should've learned my lesson when what came out of the White House "AI Education Summit" wasn't a comprehensive plan to teach Americans about AI, but instead just a cheap ploy for tech companies to offer coupons and vouchers to start using their services.
Easy to be angry but I won't comment until I see what exactly was delivered. These projects often have a lot of extra.
Just the development would be expensive but if they also worked on scoping and framing the platform, aligning multiple stakeholders (yes, even just linking outside courses mean you might have to interact with other parts of government or providers) and defining the long term vision and plan, it can get expensive pretty quickly.
Doing anything with the government is a pain. It's even worse than working in a large company. You get paid very late. You have annoying contractual provisions. It makes everything very expensive.
Not so much of the "long term vision and plan", but plenty of aligning stakeholders, as well as discovering, researching, and managing third party resources - and then there's the requirement to run the service for a further 18 months.
£4m is enough to pay for about 15 consultants for 18 months at typical rates paid by the public sector. But since this is a standalone project, call it a dozen plus overheads. That feels roughly right as a finger-in-the-air estimate for a project of that sort of scope.
There is this thing that happens in USA where RFPs are issued in such a way only one vendor could pass the mark - does that happen in UK? Reckon PwC has connections to make that happen
Probably depends on the department. I do grant and loan assessments for Innovate UK, and they have a rigorous and largely (+) transparent method for assessment which I would be happy to explain in detail. If we award money, it's accompanied by a monitoring officer (I do that as well) who is subject area expert with project management business experience. The MO meets the project every one or three months to review progress and approve payment of an installation of the grant or loan. We certainly wouldn't hand over £4M without good reason!
(+ Some of the detail of the scoring matrix is not as transparent as we would like, but Innovate UK does take feedback and tries to improve it).
It does to an extent but less so particularly from central government.
The tender is here [0], the approval process is usually pretty watertight. The contracts that go through this will have a paper trail. What you’ll likely find is that PWC has written a spec that meets the letter of the contract and they have delivered a site that meets the letter of their wording, which is what they’re good at. The fact that it didn’t actually solve the problem is inconsequential to PwC
We have an amazing gov.uk web team, they could have expanded that and built it in house with civil servants costing £60k ea per annum at the very most.
£120k, double it for stupid amounts of testing, double it again for managers to tell the people doing the work "do the work". We're still only at £500k.
Gov.uk web team are supposed to be award winning. Why are we picking shitty slop-corps to do this work?
Unfortunately because the top end of the salary is limited, to get people to work on stuff they need to bring in contractors to fill out the teams for many projects.
What is funny is that I know plenty of great engineers that won't earn $4mil ever in their life. For that amount of money you could give 4 guys $1mil each to create an amazing resource and take care of it for the next 30 years. I wonder how much PwC will charge for ongoing hosting and maintenance.
CGI is a terrible company known for going over budget and under delivering on a ton of projects. Not that many companies bidding on large government contracts unfortunately
When I checked the site this morning, the first impression I had was: They could have just linked to deeplearning[.]ai and that would have been much better.
Better yet, a link to Kaggle and provide prize funding for a few dozen competitions with most of them open to UK residents only. Directly incentivise the most driven types of people to compete and learn and give local firms a way to identify talent.
But I guess donating another £4MM to PwC is more sensible.
Just the standard procurement. It's all about risk calculation. Award the contract to a branded company, because they tell you that no one got fired for buying IBM. From PwC side, "we already got the work, now just do the minimal thing to finish off the ceremony. Keep it crap and keep the work coming". Work comes back to you not because you have been delivering great products, but because they got locked into brand names and the mess that was created.
"...while £4 million is admittedly chump change for the UK government..."
I know this is just the author deflecting the clichéd argument, but I hate that argument. The pennies do matter, otherwise the argument is made ad infinitum and you end up with a financially inept government running up a £200bn deficit.
These small websites should never be awarded to the mega-consultancies. Even if you paid the full £4m to a small webdev shop who'd feel like they'd hit the lottery I bet we'd get a better result and do more for the economy.
I think most of the cost is for handling and collaborating with the government org. As an engineer who worked with Gov orgs before, I can say it is not easy; imagine how many levels of approvals were given to put that site online.
At my last company (a telco that was government previously) they wound up paying $3 million for barely more than a Drupal theme for the public website.
Fun project to be on. We played “descope” bingo… but everyone won all the time.
someones got a new Bentley for sure and some expensive wallpaper from John Lewis...it is a shame that a country like the UK doesn't have a frontier lab and a frontier model
I started off from the press release on GOV.UK (as linked in OP and which is a paragon of virtue in web design) and followed the "Free AI foundations training" link and it all went south rather rapidly.
Its bold, brash and horrible. It does look like a set of links and its not immediately obvious where you start or what to do with it.
There are a few things that might be hyperlinks but the large weird rounded cornered sort of press me perhaps if you dare but I'm a bit flat and might kick your dog thing that might be a control or not but I'm purple and have an arrow ... ooh go on ... click me. Clicking around that area does move on to the next step which is just as obtuse.
The UK government want to write a cheque with our money for "Digital ID" whatever nebulous Tax + Services + Tracking that is... they can't even control costs on a tiny website, what is the cost of an everything site? Infinite pounds? Imagine what even a basic v1 spec for that looks like, it would probably never even be released.
A reminder the UKs Test and Trace apparently cost £29.3 billion of the £37bn allocated. Disgusting waste of money.
But at least Keir and the government will have cushy jobs to go to after they leave government.
This budget included a full modernization of their infrastructure as well as the website redesign. It's still heaps of money - but the media saying "a website cost $96 million AUD" is misleading.
It's very simple: if you're not spending your own money, so what?
All other discussion is just noise.
If you accept the idea that it's OK for the state to spend 50% of the economy, on things for you or your various self-congratulatory moral-high-horse programs, this is actually where the money will get pissed away to.
It's all carefully avoiding noticing that socialism is theft because maybe you might get a sniff of the loot.
To Mahad and people who share the same mindset: If "Do better" the worst you can say at the end of an essay, you made yourself inconsequential. Nothing will change, except everyone in the world starts mocking you for being so weak and agreeable in the face of people who in turn care exactly nothing about you and see you merely as an object to be exploited.
Here's what Asmongold would say. Coercion and incentivisation work. Charge everyone involved at gov.uk and Pwc with fraud, from the decision makers top to the lower decks doing the actual work. Enact immediate severe and drastic punishment, put them in a box for ten years and let them work off their debt to society by turning big rocks into little rocks or something. If the law is a hindrance, just change the law. It's not a real thing, it's made up, a shared idea in people's mind. If the state officials do not want to enact the will of the people, then use the 2nd box of liberty to replace them with those who do want. Anyone thinking about enriching oneself by following example of the offenders should become deathly afraid to do so. Defrauding the taxpayer would stop being a widespread problem over night.
If any of this causes a revulsion of abhorrence in your mind, then discharge yourself of social programming and put this into perspective. This is the reasonable and fair approach. They receive grace and get to keep their life. In other places and times of the world, they would simply beheaded and that would be the end of it.
If anyone reading this just wants to down-vote out of disagreement in the typical fashion of left-extremist knee-jerkers, then be advised that this bad faith acting changes no one's opinion, you're just feeding into making HN an echo chamber for radicals and you put yourself automatically on the wrong side of history for anyone to see. Try your hand not being a dismal coward by actually engaging in discussion.
marcus_holmes|1 month ago
Businesses that do meet these criteria charge like wounded bulls. In part because they know that all the other businesses that the govt could turn to will also charge like wounded bulls.
woooooo|1 month ago
I once knew someone who had to solicit 3 bids and document them to buy a $500 camera for local government. They weren't thinking "I am useless and craven", they were thinking "this is silly but I have to do it".
deaux|1 month ago
This is an absurd statement that might as well come straight out of Yes Minister. Buying from PWC reflects badly on them already, let alone when their next scandal happens. Which is of course never far away [0].
I'm sure Fujitsu met similar "criteria" when selected for Horizon. How well that selection reflected on the procurement office..
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC#Litigation
gerdesj|1 month ago
Strictly speaking its ISO 9001 but we do the same as you and call it ISO 9000. You forgot 27001 and 14001.
boznz|1 month ago
wasmainiac|1 month ago
Why accept the status que? How many working lives of tax revenue did this bs consume?
azornathogron|1 month ago
> If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business.
You don't think that spending £4.1 million on this garbage might reflect badly on someone?
OkayPhysicist|1 month ago
Step 1: Come up with an incredibly easy to meet standard (because you don't want anybody abandoning the process because it's too much of a hassle) that sounds like a reasonable requirement on paper (to make it easy to pitch as a basic requirement of doing business). Say, "Have a plan for the things you do".
Step 2: Add one additional requirement to your standard: "Prioritize Vendors that meet this standard".
Step 3: Obscure the hell out of the standard, (to not make the grift too obvious) and stick it behind a paywall.
Step 4: Franchise out the (nigh-impossible to fail) "approval" process to 3rd parties, who pay you for the privilege.
Step 5: Your first few "standardized" companies put pressure on their vendors and customers to get certified, so they hire consultants, who in turn pay you, who tell them "Good job, you meet the standard. But do your vendors?".
Step 6: Watch as the cash floods in.
(Optional, Step 7): Once a bunch of major companies are certified, target governments to do your marketing push for you.
dizzy9|1 month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-for-Honours_scandal
michaelt|1 month ago
> Labour taking free staff from scandal-hit consulting firms
> [...] The party has quietly accepted more than £230,000 worth of free staff from ‘big four’ accounting firms PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Ernst & Young (EY) since Keir Starmer took over as leader in 2020.
Still, I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the ruling party was gifted £230k of free services from PwC, then brought a static website from PwC for £4.1 million of taxpayer money.
boznz|1 month ago
jaccola|1 month ago
One of the given reasons is because Burnham is currently mayor of Greater Manchester, and running a new election there would cost approx £4m(!!) which is a huge waste of taxpayer money.
I was surprised that they even gave this as a faux reason since it seems like the sort of money they would spend on replenishing the water coolers, or buying bic pens, or... building a static website!
mellosouls|1 month ago
eg.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/28/labour-debt-peter...
https://doctorsforthenhs.org.uk/the-truth-about-the-lies-tha...
etc
FridayoLeary|1 month ago
Why can't he just do both jobs? Boris did it iirc.
wackget|1 month ago
I have worked with many "big agency" developers and can tell you categorically that they are more often than not absolutely terrible at their jobs.
thinkingemote|1 month ago
https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/001337-2025?or...
roryirvine|1 month ago
adi_kurian|1 month ago
dateSISC|1 month ago
Frotag|1 month ago
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=all
webdev1234568|1 month ago
Scammers are winners.
ctippett|1 month ago
ebbi|1 month ago
It's frustrating, because these larger firms most always churn out subpar work and this mindset just keeps funding it so they don't improve.
stuaxo|1 month ago
layman51|1 month ago
thoughtpeddler|1 month ago
StopDisinfo910|1 month ago
Just the development would be expensive but if they also worked on scoping and framing the platform, aligning multiple stakeholders (yes, even just linking outside courses mean you might have to interact with other parts of government or providers) and defining the long term vision and plan, it can get expensive pretty quickly.
Doing anything with the government is a pain. It's even worse than working in a large company. You get paid very late. You have annoying contractual provisions. It makes everything very expensive.
roryirvine|1 month ago
Not so much of the "long term vision and plan", but plenty of aligning stakeholders, as well as discovering, researching, and managing third party resources - and then there's the requirement to run the service for a further 18 months.
£4m is enough to pay for about 15 consultants for 18 months at typical rates paid by the public sector. But since this is a standalone project, call it a dozen plus overheads. That feels roughly right as a finger-in-the-air estimate for a project of that sort of scope.
_pdp_|1 month ago
whalesalad|1 month ago
edoceo|1 month ago
There is this thing that happens in USA where RFPs are issued in such a way only one vendor could pass the mark - does that happen in UK? Reckon PwC has connections to make that happen
tengwar2|1 month ago
(+ Some of the detail of the scoring matrix is not as transparent as we would like, but Innovate UK does take feedback and tries to improve it).
maccard|1 month ago
The tender is here [0], the approval process is usually pretty watertight. The contracts that go through this will have a paper trail. What you’ll likely find is that PWC has written a spec that meets the letter of the contract and they have delivered a site that meets the letter of their wording, which is what they’re good at. The fact that it didn’t actually solve the problem is inconsequential to PwC
[0] https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/021898-2024
pbhjpbhj|1 month ago
£120k, double it for stupid amounts of testing, double it again for managers to tell the people doing the work "do the work". We're still only at £500k.
Gov.uk web team are supposed to be award winning. Why are we picking shitty slop-corps to do this work?
stuaxo|1 month ago
matthewcford|1 month ago
I've heard of large SIs charging millions for discovery work, only for the report to say the budget is not enough to build the project.
Never mind the standards orgs tendering needs to meet (ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus). It's not for the faint-hearted.
vasco|1 month ago
heldrida|29 days ago
eranation|1 month ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#:~:text=estimat...
mtoner23|1 month ago
sbstp|1 month ago
chpatrick|1 month ago
ahtcx|1 month ago
Oras|1 month ago
and that's before knowing about the £4M
cmcaleer|1 month ago
But I guess donating another £4MM to PwC is more sensible.
zkmon|1 month ago
enceladus06|1 month ago
cs02rm0|1 month ago
I know this is just the author deflecting the clichéd argument, but I hate that argument. The pennies do matter, otherwise the argument is made ad infinitum and you end up with a financially inept government running up a £200bn deficit.
These small websites should never be awarded to the mega-consultancies. Even if you paid the full £4m to a small webdev shop who'd feel like they'd hit the lottery I bet we'd get a better result and do more for the economy.
__coder__|1 month ago
haritha-j|1 month ago
testing22321|1 month ago
Fun project to be on. We played “descope” bingo… but everyone won all the time.
DANmode|1 month ago
aquir|1 month ago
lifestyleguru|1 month ago
gerdesj|1 month ago
I started off from the press release on GOV.UK (as linked in OP and which is a paragon of virtue in web design) and followed the "Free AI foundations training" link and it all went south rather rapidly.
Its bold, brash and horrible. It does look like a set of links and its not immediately obvious where you start or what to do with it.
There are a few things that might be hyperlinks but the large weird rounded cornered sort of press me perhaps if you dare but I'm a bit flat and might kick your dog thing that might be a control or not but I'm purple and have an arrow ... ooh go on ... click me. Clicking around that area does move on to the next step which is just as obtuse.
I do hope that clears things up!
subscribed|1 month ago
motbus3|1 month ago
em1sar|1 month ago
[deleted]
heldrida|29 days ago
navigate8310|1 month ago
blibble|1 month ago
andy_ppp|1 month ago
A reminder the UKs Test and Trace apparently cost £29.3 billion of the £37bn allocated. Disgusting waste of money.
But at least Keir and the government will have cushy jobs to go to after they leave government.
whenc|1 month ago
https://fullfact.org/health/NHS-test-and-trace-app-37-billio...
"The NAO said that of the approximately £13.5 billion spent on the NHS Test and Trace programme in 2020/21, £35 million was spent on the app.
The vast majority of the spending in that year was accounted for by testing (£10.4 billion)."
camillomiller|1 month ago
seemaze|1 month ago
Feels so timely. May we all aspire to such a simple goal.
jaimex2|1 month ago
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology...
pfych|1 month ago
boznz|1 month ago
chrismsimpson|1 month ago
ILoveHorses|1 month ago
jalapenos|1 month ago
All other discussion is just noise.
If you accept the idea that it's OK for the state to spend 50% of the economy, on things for you or your various self-congratulatory moral-high-horse programs, this is actually where the money will get pissed away to.
It's all carefully avoiding noticing that socialism is theft because maybe you might get a sniff of the loot.
marsavar|1 month ago
bmn__|1 month ago
Here's what Asmongold would say. Coercion and incentivisation work. Charge everyone involved at gov.uk and Pwc with fraud, from the decision makers top to the lower decks doing the actual work. Enact immediate severe and drastic punishment, put them in a box for ten years and let them work off their debt to society by turning big rocks into little rocks or something. If the law is a hindrance, just change the law. It's not a real thing, it's made up, a shared idea in people's mind. If the state officials do not want to enact the will of the people, then use the 2nd box of liberty to replace them with those who do want. Anyone thinking about enriching oneself by following example of the offenders should become deathly afraid to do so. Defrauding the taxpayer would stop being a widespread problem over night.
If any of this causes a revulsion of abhorrence in your mind, then discharge yourself of social programming and put this into perspective. This is the reasonable and fair approach. They receive grace and get to keep their life. In other places and times of the world, they would simply beheaded and that would be the end of it.
If anyone reading this just wants to down-vote out of disagreement in the typical fashion of left-extremist knee-jerkers, then be advised that this bad faith acting changes no one's opinion, you're just feeding into making HN an echo chamber for radicals and you put yourself automatically on the wrong side of history for anyone to see. Try your hand not being a dismal coward by actually engaging in discussion.
beejiu|1 month ago
simgt|1 month ago
samtp|1 month ago
293736729129|1 month ago
madaxe_again|1 month ago
This will have as much effect as a gnat’s fart.
FBISurveillance|1 month ago