One of the government’s election pledges is to reduce public service spending on consultants and contractors by $400 million a year.
This is probably why David Seymour has publicly mused about reducing the cost of school lunches: the Ministry of Education contracts out the entire programme at a grand sum of $323m, a large proportion of the $1.2 billion the core public service spent on contractors and consultants during 2022-23.
Some of the first casualties of the cutbacks have been the business consultancies: why should public agencies pay PwC or EY millions of dollars to spout incomprehensible jargon about agile backend fungibility