Hallo, fijn dat je luistert naar Stuurloos, waarin we het hebben over hoe wij Nederlanders een beter bestuur kunnen krijgen. Mijn naam is Koestaf Bessems en in deze podcast van de Volkskrant ga ik raden bij mensen die daarover ons denken verder kunnen helpen. Deze keer Rosie Cullington, die een boek schreef over de consultancy-industrie en hoe die bedrijven verzwakt, overheden infantiliseert en de economie uit het lood trekt. De big...
Khan heet het boek in het Engels, steviger dan de Nederlandse vertaling die net uit is en simpelweg de consultancy-industrie heet. Want Khan, dat klinkt echt naar zwendel. En als je het boek leest, dan denk je ook wel, waar is deze branche van meer dan 800 miljard euro? eigenlijk op gebaseerd? Hoe kan het dat kerntaken van de overheid aan consultants worden overgelaten? En kan die overheid zich nog uit deze ongezonde relatie losmaken?
Daar ga ik het over hebben met auteur Rosie Cullington, verbonden aan het Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose in Londen. En dat wordt geleid door de bekende econome Mariana Mazzucato, met wie ze het boek schreef. Het gesprek is in het Engels. Als dat te lastig is, te verschijnt een korte geschreven versie. De planning kan altijd wijzigen, maar die zou vanaf drie uur niet te vinden moeten zijn bij de Volkskrant.
As I was talking to people just around me about the topic of your book and the conversation that we're going to have, the consulting industry, I noticed that still quite a lot of people... think of that as, you know, just companies coming in to give some advice to other companies and to governments. How accurate is that? On the one hand, so what we find is, what we have found is that... Businesses and governments.
Contract consultancies for various different reasons, right? So sometimes it might be because there is a genuine demand for some expertise, some advice that government doesn't have internally. Very often they are contract... ...to essentially do the functions of government.
What we have found during the research for the book is that businesses and governments and other organisations contract consultancies for various different reasons. So there isn't one reason why consultancies might get contracted.
De standarde view, de view that comes from the industry and from some schools of thought in economics, is that consultancies are contracted because they... are able to provide this kind of objective source of knowledge, this expertise that can't be found anywhere else in the economy.
Sometimes perhaps a more generalist or kind of business process form of expertise. And that in providing this expertise to clients, they are helping those clients to create cost savings. They're helping them to become. en meer efficiënt en daarvoor creëren economie van scale in knowledge.
So this is the kind of mainstream or dominant view. I don't think we can call it mainstream because I don't think most people think about the consulting industry very much at all and its role in the economy. No, that's true. Maar als ze hebben een image van het, dit is de klassische image. Ik zou zeggen dat dit heeft de dominant. van een strand van economie. Of course, we speak to mensen die in de public sector werken, en mensen die werken als consultants zelfs.
They will have a very different view of the role of the consulting sector and of what consultants actually do. Consultants, they'll tend not to reflect that they are creating value by... Reducing transaction costs. Or that they're genuinely transferring expertise. Or providing advice. They very much recognise often. That they can be brought in. To do things like. Legitimate a decision.
...that has already been made in a company doing this thing called... ...what people who we spoke to in interviews have described as rubber stamping. They know that a decision has already been made and they go in to give it. wat was described in our book by one person we spoke to as the Deloitte stamp of approval. Right, so leadership in organisation has really already made up its mind about what to do.
Maar ze willen dat de organisatie, de superiore, of de publiek, dat dit iets was echt nodig om te doen, want Deloitte of andere consultancy. ...he has really done some research and come up with a report... ...and this is what they're telling us to do. Exactly. So that's one reason. And as I mentioned, there's a few other reasons. But you describe also that they actually do...
de governing in many instances, instead of government. Yes, so particularly since the 1990s in Anglo-Saxon economies and slightly later in other economies. This certainly isn't to the same extent everywhere, but in many countries governments have increased outsourcing of both public... services development and implementation delivery right and that could be both to what you know considered public service companies public services
consultancies or outsourcing consultancies. So in the UK, that would be, for example, Circo. I don't know any Dutch equivalents. In Denmark, it would be Falk, you know, these kind of big... Perhaps you have Circo, Sodexo, Atos, also in the Netherlands. What these companies actually do often is manage the contracting process on behalf of the government. So most of what they do is not actually delivering contracts themselves. It is subcontracting on behalf of government.
De growth van deze type van contracten, die zijn prime contracten, heel erg begrepen, van de 1990s, onder deze idee, dat vroeger neoliberalisme, dat vroeger met dit. ... ... ... ... turn to the private sector to do things, then more government should do that. So the growth of consulting contracts, both for these kind of outsourcing services, but also policy advice, other types of kind of implementation or evaluation is kind of core.
of an administration. We've seen an increase in all of these types of contracts since that period. Can you describe a few examples of activities that these companies engage in that people might be surprised? To hear about. I think you mentioned the vaccine rollout in the UK, for instance. Yeah, so in the UK, and not just in the UK and many other countries, but the UK, it has been particularly widespread. The UK government turned to big management consultancy.
So the big three and the big four, which are the companies that we focus on in the book. So that's the big three are McKinsey. Boston Consulting Group and Balen Company. And they are companies that are usually associated with being these kind of strategy consultancies. And they also have the big four accountancies that actually get more of their...
Revenue from contracts for management consulting services and for auditing services. And the profit margins on consulting are much bigger as well. And the big four are Ernst & Young, KPMG, PwC and Deloitte. So, during the pandemic, the UK government contracted in particular Deloitte, but also the other... de andere companies as well, to provide a range of services and do a number of things as part of the pandemic response, including...
in de U.K. de ontwikkeling van onze nationalen test-en-trace system. Dus de virus-monitoring, maar ook de digitale appen dat was gevoerd door de government. ...which was deemed by the Public Accounts Committee, which is a parliamentary body that... evaluates and monitors public spending, this body found that the test and trace programme had completely failed on its own terms or pretty much had failed to reduce chains of transmission.
Deloitte was also contracted to help source personal protective equipment for the NHS. So the kind of clothing that was going to keep NHS staff safe. It was also contracted to evaluate. de NHS's medical ethics review programme for research done in the NHS. So you think on all of these things, the question becomes, if the government needed help, why did it turn to Deloitte? Why was Deloitte viewed as having expertise in procuring personal protective equipment?
Dat is iets dat de NHS heeft gedaan sinds het inception. Waar was het contracted om medical ethics te werken? We have professors and patient groups who probably should have been at the heart of that process. So again, what we criticise is not necessarily the involvement of advisers.
of consultants, understood as a kind of much broader term than we generally kind of understand the term, but actually the scale and scope of the involvement of consultants. Yeah, this is a very big issue here in the Netherlands as well. Recently numbers came out that this year again a record number has been spent on... Outsourcing. Officially the goal is to reduce it. Parliament has adapted the motion also to reduce it, but every year it's more and more.
The question that you ask, like why ask Deloitte or these other consulting firms, what is your answer to that? Why are governments so, why is it almost a reflex to get these companies in? Ja, dus er zijn twee levels aan dit. De Big Con beschrijft niet alleen de... We do look at those things in the book. We have a whole chapter in what we call consultology. The ways that the kind of... Mechanisms that.
consultancies employed to try to prove that they are neutral brokers of expertise, that they are legitimate, all of these things. But we also have to look again at this relationship, the historical relationship between governments.
Businesses and consultancies. And the broader transformations of capitalism. And of government. And the way we think about government in our economies. So the reason why the book instructed us. The reason why we begin the analysis. With these two history chapters. Is because we don't. I don't think you can understand the big con without understanding the ways that government has been...
Maar civil servants en de publiek hebben in de publiek in de publiek. En de publiek in de publiek in de publiek. En de publiek in de publiek in de publiek in de publiek. UK and the US. It's no coincidence that under Margaret Thatcher in the UK, this is when we really saw a very rapid growth of spending on management consultancies. So consulting spend at the beginning of Thatcher's tenure...
in 1979 was just 6 million pounds per year and by the end of her tenure 11 years later it was 246 million pounds so it really is you know this kind of this this huge growth and they were brought in to provide advice on things like how to provide de railways, hoe to make services more efficient. Dus de growth van consulten echt went hand-in-hand met de growth van de idee dat government was een ineffectief actor in de economie en het zou kunnen gaan uit de weg als mogelijk mogelijk.
Ja, je hebt deze twee perioden gezien gezien. Je zei het al een moment ago, een movement being neoliberalisme, Reagan, Thatcher. Bluntly stating that government only stands in the way of all the good that markets can do for society and really should be diminished as much as possible. But then right after that came the third way, as it is called.
We had a government like that here in Holland as well, led by Wim Cook, who was prime minister back then. No idea if you're aware of this, but he was actually credited by... Ja. Ja. Want hun filosofie was, oké, government is not totally useless, but it is more a facilitator of the market, right? Ja, exactly. I think it's great, I guess, that there is a conversation around the third way.
in de Nederlandse. Maar in de UK, dat is niet de case. In de US, dat is niet echt de case. Er zijn twee perspectiefs. One is dat Tony Blair en Clinton waren true progressives. back social services and brought people back into the economy. The other, which we see more from the left, is that Blair and Clinton were a continuation of Thatcher and Reagan.
On the one hand, they were a continuation of Thatcher and Reagan insofar as, as we saw in the UK as we've discussed, outsourcing actually increased and became entrenched under the Blair government and also under Clinton. But on the other hand, it's important to distinguish...
I think also for the politics of today, where we're seeing a kind of return of the state, a recognition that government has an important role to play again in kind of shaping our economies and meeting the challenge of the green transition. The differences are still very important. We talk in the book about this phrase that really epitomises the Third Way, which was that the role of government should be to steer, but not row.
...which we argue is a logical fallacy, is illogical... ...because we suggest governments cannot steer... ...if they are not doing some rowing, if they don't know. ... ... ... Exactly, yes. Hoe de Nederlanders krijgen een beter government? En een van de grote toekomst die heel veel komt, is de broekende connectieën tussen, on de one hand, de politiekers, de mensen die uit de politiek.
En dan op de andere kant, mensen eigenlijk executen het op de grond. En dat lijkt ook te relatie aan wat je nu is, als je outsourcet veel van je core activiteiten. Then you lose a lot of knowledge or so. Yeah, absolutely. So it's not just the case that outsourcing can be inefficient. And it can be very inefficient. It can cost a lot more money than could be.
of it cost a lot more money than it would if things were done internally. We might point to various things that happened during the pandemic as an example of that. But it's not just that it can become inefficient in the short term, cost inefficient. It's also that... When we take a kind of longer term horizon, the cost of not trying to develop these capabilities in... of investing internally within the public sector, can also be that the government loses the ability to adapt.
Het is waar dit woord infantilisert komt. De government stopt developen. Het stopt developen. Het stopt developen. Het stopt developen. Het stopt developen. Het stopt developen. Dat is ontwikkeling. To create additional capacity. En als we denken over wat governments zijn voor. We don't think about governments as being public sectors, government ministries, government departments and agencies, teams within them. We don't think about these as being...
Particularly specialist. Because the dominant idea about governments is that they're full of people who push paper and they're... Boring bureaucrats. En wat ze doen is mundane. Het is gewoon niet true. Als je even een dag in government... Als je een career in government... ...en iedereen die werkt in government... ...knots dat wat gaat om... ...requiret de specialist knowledge.
Het acquies een tacit knowledge, een experience, dat kan niet zeker zijn codified. Well, maar eigenlijk, omdat de outsourcing is, het wordt meer verhaal. Ik denk dat je bent, als je dat... Working in government requires all this specialist knowledge. But a big issue seems to be that less and less specialist knowledge is available in government.
Want we had one other guest in this series. He has a very technical software background. And he took issue with this a lot. And he sort of described it as government, departments, ministries. They've become a bunch of contracts. They still have two main activities. One is a very judicial side where they contract others to do stuff. En de andere belangrijke is de communicatie over wat ze doen. Maar de werk en de expertise dat komt met het, seems to have leaked away.
I mean, completely, absolutely. We talk about it in the book as being a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? So the more that government outsources... ...the more it becomes dependent on these other actors. It creates a relationship of dependency... ...between the government and the consulting sector. That is part of the issue with the consulting industry... ...and the business models that...
de consulting industry is dat eigenlijk het kan be very profitable, very lucrative, het kan be important voor de growth van de sector, dat government en andere organisaties komen te dependen op hen als een source van capacity. En we hebben dat. Maar als we denken in democratic societies, wat government is supposed to do, wat we want government to be able to do, is to be able to adapt.
as our needs and demands as citizens change as new challenges emerge such as the climate crisis as businesses create new things as we're seeing in big tech we want governments to be able to adapt to regulate them, to shape those industries and to be able to continue to provide the things that we need if government isn't investing in-house and it's not able to adapt in this way. Sometimes it might go a little bit.
first for people, but you mentioned there also business-wise it's not in the interest of the consulting industry. ...to make their clients independent of the consulting industry. So there's a very strange perverted incentive there. Because of course ideally that is what would happen. You're wondering how to do something. ZANG EN MUZIEK Ja, exactly. We describe, we use the metaphor of, if you imagine, a bad therapist is one...
Dat blijft hun client in therapy forever, rather than providing them with the tools that they need to be able to manage their mental health and develop and all the rest of it, or to be able to get better. So that's one way that we can... Lekker het. Ik weet het, de broeder, de broeder kind of implicatie van dit als wel, dat, je weet, dat, je weet, dat...
We know that many consultants are brilliant and well-intentioned. They are often young people who... want to have an impact in the world who want to be at the forefront of the green transition for example but this business model can be very stifling to those ...values-oriented ambitions... ...that people working in consultancy... ...often have. Because there is an imperative... ...to ensure that...
This imperative might not always win over, but we have to suggest it has a tendency to win over because the sector invariably in individual companies have a profit bottom line. They might say they have a triple bottom line, but they are looking to grow. They are looking to maintain profitability and to grow ultimately. So they have a bottom line. And that can stifle the type of advice or can influence the type of advice that...
die consultoren might willen geven. Dus een group van consultoren might komen tot een conclusie dat een company moet doen één ding om het te doen om het te doen. En dat ding, even if het is de moest effectief ding...
...to reduce carbon emissions is going to be the most expensive thing... ...or more expensive, it might suggest this other thing... ...because ultimately that's what the client might prefer to hear from them... ...and therefore be more likely to contract that company again in the future. Ja, want het is altijd heel erg aimed aan te cutting costs, becoming leaner, daarvoor pleasing stockholders, eigenlijk.
Ja, often, of als we kijken naar de growth van klimaat- en-sustainability-consulting, bijvoorbeeld, dat is een manier van, oké, hoe we het om te doen, maar doen ze in de cheapest way. Dus het moet niet hebben inkelezingen profits. Maar het might, als de kind van de primary goal, maar het might have, you know, getting this other goal done in the cheapest way possible. And there are quite blatant conflicts of interest. And in the book you use...
Actually, Climate Consulting is the main example of that. Waar, on the one hand, one client might be a government wanting to fight climate change or wanting to initiate climate adaptation. On the other hand, big fossil fuel. Companies might be your other clients with completely different interests. Yeah, absolutely. So we talk about conflicting interests quite a lot in the book and the climate consulting sector.
De climate consulting boom, as we describe it, is probably one of the most obvious examples of this. So we use the case of... McKinsey's work that it did with the Australian government, so McKinsey was contracted, was paid 6 million Australian dollars to do the analysis and the modelling underpinning the Australian government's net zero strategy. Now, this strategy was found to be completely full of holes. When it was launched at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021,
60th out of 60 net zero strategies. Because it didn't even get Australia to net zero by 2050. It was like 80% to net zero. And then relying on a bunch of technologies that didn't already exist yet. Als commentators in Australia started looking more at this, they were asking, hang on a second.
Could the reason why McKinsey has produced this work that seemingly doesn't actually help our government get to net zero, could that be because it is trying to protect interests of its other firms potentially? McKinsey has advised 43 of the 100 biggest polluters. And they're not just looking at McKinsey, they're also asking...
Could the reason why the government recruited McKinsey in the first place, and we know the previous government in Australia was explicitly resistant to concerted government intervention in climate policy and climate governance, could the reason why the government... in McKinsey in the first place be that the government actually wasn't that interested in... They knew it wouldn't be that ambitious. Exactly, yeah. You almost have to... Admire it as a business as you go through your book, right?
It almost seems like there are no circumstances in which the consultancy firms lose. Like it doesn't matter what the developments are, what happens in society, be it Brexit, be it climate change, be it a financial crisis. It doesn't really matter. No matter what happens under any circumstances, they seem to adapt and convince governments and other companies that they are who you need to call to fix things. And they do everything with...
Almost no risk or responsibility. Because when things go wrong, it is still the board of the actual company that hired them or the minister who is responsible in parliament who gets all the slack for it. Ja, great point. In a way, you have to admire this, or you have to admire the success of this business model. It has been very successful. Undoubtedly, it's now... Oat de tijd dat we were te doen van de sector te doen in 2021, het was tussen 700 tot 900 miljard.
So almost a trillion dollars globally, right? It's a big sector. Almost hard to comprehend. Yes, exactly. You know, there is some kind of suggestion that it has shrunk a bit in the wake of the COVID-19 induced... Oh, COVID-19 and... OIL CRISIS INDUZE GLOBAL RECESSION. We see that after every recession. We see in the first couple of years a shrinking of the size of the sector. But then it picks up speed again. They won't be worried.
too much about shrinking at the moment no but I mean absolutely right and I guess Dat is also waar we wanted to look at this in the way we did. This is not just the case of a few people pulling some strings. They play a very important structural role in our economies today. They are providing advice to governments. They are doing things for governments. They are doing things for business. They are advising. Ze geven een soort van legitimatie en blame-avoidance voor bedrijven.
en echt risk-taken zelfs. Het is een very profitable business model. Dat is waar we ook describe het als... Niet just profitable, maar het is een formel van rent-seeking. Want de business model is such dat de companies are able to take on and receive huge fees for these contracts. Without ever really taking on any of the risks of them themselves.
How did you personally get involved with the topic? Yeah, so when I worked in public policy a couple of years ago, more than a couple of years ago now, when I first finished my undergraduate. Before I came back to academia, in the UK, you don't need to do a master's before you can go into the real world of work. Thankfully, because it's very expensive in the UK to do a master's. So I went and I worked in different... public policy organisations for a few years. I also have two degrees in...
Political science. So a lot of my friends went to work in consultancies straight after we graduated. I also, in one of my jobs, spent about six months working with a consultancy on secondment with one of the big... en zo got to kind of learn firsthand how they operate and just became very interested in you know.
de scale en scope van de sector. Ik ben, als ik werken in public policy, een van de dingen die ik was looking at was outsourcing in public health services. Dus dat kwam across door mijn policy research. En dan kwam ik te realise, even though increasingly, thank goodness, lots of journalists over the past few years have been doing fantastic investigative work, looking at...
kind of cases where consultancies have been working with governments where they've maybe gone wrong or working with business. There's a great book that was published at the end of last year as well called When McKinsey Comes to Town in the US. Investigative journalism has been really important.
in de past few years for shedding light on the fact that this sector exists and that it is doing things that can be potentially harmful or that it is involved in things that are potentially harmful. But at the time that we were writing this book... En still today, er was niet een...
Dat try to situate de growth van de sector in de broader development in government en capitalism. We used de cases en we're very grateful. We pay a lot of credit to the investigative journalism work. But what we were trying to do was really understand. it structurally and systemically and how it fits in with the economy. And when you say we, that's Mariana Mazzucato and you? Yes. How did you end up writing it together?
Ja, goed, goed, goed, goed. Het is eigenlijk iets wat ik get asked quite a lot, als je kunt imagine, want Mariana Mazzucato is een amazing global superstar professor, economist, en ik ben een fijn van haar werk. I met Mariana in 2019. at a student conference, I was presenting some of my master's thesis research, and Marianna just happened to be the discussant on the panel where I was presenting my research. She was just volunteering for the day to speak to these young...
Politico Economist. I gave the presentation and it was about outsourcing. Privatisation that occurs through outsourcing of public sector digital infrastructures, which is research that I've published on since, in academic journals. And after I gave the presentation, Mariana said... Please apply to do a PhD with me. So that was amazing. I mean, wow, how are we asking to do that? And then, you know, some months into my PhD, Marianna said...
Let's write this book together. I think someone needs to write a book about the role of the consulting industry. I want to do more work on this. Let's do it together. Of course, at first I was pretty shocked. I was like, wow. We then worked together on it for a few years and it was a great project, it was a great collaboration. And so you were working already on outsourcing of IT. Ja. Ja, dat is also een heel groot issue hier, voor instance, met taxes. Dus er is een reale danger moment dat...
Our tax service in a few years will not be able to perform even its most basic tasks anymore because all these systems are so old and not maintained. Maar ook omdat de IT knowledge en experience is niet in de agencies meer. Dus dat is ook een belangrijkste vraag hier. Ja, een parallel case dat je misschien wel wilt zien, want het gebeurt in Denmark. Het is een parallel case dat het gebeurt in de Danish Tax Authority een paar jaar geleden. Ja, een paar jaar geleden.
Het was in 2016 of 2017 dat ze niet kunnen implementeren wat de EU... ...had introduced for members. And they were unable to implement it properly and it was a huge crisis. And the Danish government subsequently did a report on the use or how they go on to manage... IT vendors and consultants and contractors in the future. And the language they use is very much the knowledge that we need.
is in the heads of a few vendors and contractors. We don't have it in the public sector, so we can't actually transform these technologies that are so fundamental to our tax system and therefore to the Danish welfare state. This is at the heart. So I did interviews with people who had been involved in this issue in the public sector as part of my research. And someone I spoke to from the digitalisation agency, the line that he said was, we were at the point...
Maar het was de IT systemen dat mandat wat de politiciën zou kunnen doen en niet de andere manier. We zijn in exacte dat situatie. Dus, ze hebben gewoon officially gezegd... We can't do anything extra anymore for the next four years, more or less. The only thing we can do is try and repair. ...enough to be able to do the basics. For instance, they wanted to lower taxes on fruit and vegetables for health reasons. Couldn't do it. Too complicated. And this touches on something that...
Ik denk dat voor veel mensen het still is counterintuitive. Ik denk dat je het al eerder in onze conversantie mentioned dat outsourcing, gebruikers, gebruikers, maakt je minder flexibel. less agile. When of course the philosophy was if you employ all those people yourselves and you have them on your payroll
Then you're a slow giant. It's very hard to pivot. You're much more flexible when you're a lean organisation and you only have the people who run all the processes and who organise. And then you just get the expertise in that you need. whenever you need it. And then you're light on your feet and you move quick. But it seems like the exact opposite has come out of it.
Ja, ik ben, dit is de issue, en dit is waar het komt back to, waar we hebben to really delve into... assumptions about what knowledge is and how learning happens in the public sector right so the assumption of a kind of super lean organization it may well work for for example a small programming organisation where all of the knowledge is very clearly codifiable in a programming language and perhaps then it is possible to switch in and out the programmers because everything is
All of that knowledge is in code, as long as people are using the same programming language or whatever. That is not how knowledge exists and expertise exists in the real world. We can't codify most knowledge that exists. of not necessarily most knowledge it very much depends of course on the type of work that someone's doing but a lot of knowledge particularly in the public sector where so much of it
So much of kind of day-to-day knowledge about even how government works, you know, how the department works, how the team works, what the kind of service area is perhaps that a policy is working in. If it's a public-facing frontline role, what the... is dat dat service is serving.
All of this knowledge, you know, you can't just type it up on a piece of paper and hand it over to someone and expect that that's going to constitute knowledge transfer. So this idea of having a like super lean organisation. relies on an idea about knowledge that isn't real, that isn't how knowledge exists in the real world. Well, and also it might work for some task.
In de short term. Yes, yeah. Like a limited task in de short term. But of course the whole characteristic of government is that you have huge challenges for the next decades. Dat is ook waarom climate change is een goed voorbeeld. Je zou willen een learning organisatie dat is constantly werken op dit topic, worden er beter op het als ze gaan. En withholding all the knowledge and expertise and experience within as you go along. Absolutely. No, exactly.
We know that the climate crisis is not going away anytime soon. So why would governments not be trying to build this capacity? We can't be certain about everything with the climate crisis. We can't know exactly. ...when temperatures are going to become unlivable... ...or when...
In Europa we might become affected by flash flooding or whatever. We can't be very accurate about some of these things. But we are certain that this is going to be a problem for a long, long time. So why are we not developing public sector capacity properly, internally? in de public sector to respond to the climate crisis.
Dat is niet te zeggen dat governments niet ook kunnen werken met mensen in particular areas outside van de government. Of course. Ze kunnen niet gebruiken deze expertise. Het is niet een case van governments doen alles bij zichzelf. Het is natuurlijk niet. Maar het is dat... In order to be able to work well with other actors, government needs to have that knowledge itself internally as well. And you notice that other parties are often not engaged.
Voor instance, Academia of all sorts of other organisations and companies have a lot of know-how. Yes. This I also remember, by the way, from the pandemic. There were a lot of... companies, academics, people with field experience with pandemics elsewhere, who are like, okay, I want to contribute. ...to what's going on here. And they tried to get through to government, which was of course in crisis mode, so that is partly an excuse. But there also didn't seem to be any...
Er was no real way to get in touch with your own government if you wanted to help out on something that you knew a lot about. Ja, absoluut. En dit is, wanneer we talk at de end, in de climate crisis chapter, we talk about a professor who was one of the founders of the IPCC. of helped to publish the first IBCC report. And if we look at the things that he was saying, Patrick...
Godwin Oluwobesi. If we look at the things that he was saying in the 1990s, and this was someone who had this amazing research career as a meteorologist, both in Nigeria but also globally in other parts of the world. was de leader of the World Meteorological Organisation. The things that he was saying was, you know, this needs systemic change, this needs systemic change, kept saying all of this. And it seems, you know, no one was listening to people like... ZANG EN MUZIEK
We know now that that market-led self-regulation approach to the climate crisis has not worked. It hasn't worked on its own term. That's not an opinion. That's a fact. The IPCC supports that. Ik denk dat veel mensen, of mensen, nu ook alstubliezen dat de government heeft een belangrijke rol in plaats, zoals het in de Parijs-agreemende en de andere klimaatveranderingen dat de governments over de wereld hebben.
Maar je moet je wonderen waar het is, en niet alleen van de scientifische expertise, niet alleen van de professors, maar waar dat expertise en ook de voices van de mensen in de communities die zijn moest affected by de climate crisis.
...by groups, de voices of people who have different types of knowledge and experience... ...when it comes to looking after the environment and ecosystems and biodiversity. So that would include indigenous communities. People who have different value systems when it comes...
het ondersteunen van de land. Het ook includes, perhaps, trade union groups, We certainly need to have a more central role in terms of thinking about how the green transition actually protects jobs and ensures that people have good livelihoods through it and aren't losing work.
of losing work when high emitting sectors invariably have to close down or reduce production. All of these other voices could affect, could shape the type of green transition that we have. And instead, advice is coming from... Dus we moeten vragen dat is. Is er een escape van dit? Want, zoals je zei, het is een self-fulfilling prophecy geweest.
I mean, you mentioned a lot of your own friends went to work with consultancy companies. I'm curious if you've heard anything from them about the book, by the way. So maybe you can tell us about that as well. And you mentioned also people who have... Goed intentions. Goed to work there because they want to have an impact. Be it on the green transition or anything else. It has become the place where a lot of talented people want to go and work.
en de regeringen wordt in dat plaats less zo. Als je gewoon naar de allocatie van funden, waar de money gaat, zoals je zeiens, dan zo veel money gaat naar dat. How do you reverse this movement? Is that even possible? Yeah, so the book is necessarily critical because we recognise that we need to... analyse de sector properly. And part of doing the analysis is questioning the things that the sector says about its value that it's creating. But it's not a critical book insofar as...
We end on, I think, quite optimistic terms about how governments can rebuild capacity and can become effective democratic economic actors again. Part of that... De eerste ding we call voor, het is een groot challenge, maar het is een belangrijk one. of rethinking or transforming our narratives or the narratives that we have about the role of government in our economies, the role of learning in organisations in the public sector and across our other economies, of course the involvement.
...of democratic actors... ...and the kind of advice that governments get. Dus dat is een ding. Maar er zijn concrete dingen. We pointen naar een number van concrete dingen. Dat governments die ontwikkeld heeft met hun capaciteit en capaciteit. Of ontwikkeld heeft een dependatie op consultancies of andere contractors.
Reduce their dependency. And rebuild public sector capacity. So to give you an example. The Danish government. Denmark is fascinating. Because in both public sector digitalisation. But also in its use of consultancies. ...many people, because we view it as a kind of welfare state heaven. I'm in Denmark, but I'm not Danish. When we're coming from the outside, we often think, wow, Denmark must have everything right. But actually, the public sector in Denmark has...
Volgen, victim, to many of the same... Flaws dat de rest van ons, de rest van ons, de rest van onze governments heeft, including van het gaat om IT digitaliseringen en van het gebruik van consultants. En in 2019, de Danish government, als het was elected, kwam in... Pledging to cut spending on consultancies. And importantly, what it did.
was establish this in-house public sector consultancy to ensure that when government departments cut spending on consultancies, there wasn't like a short term or an immediate capacity deficit. And instead, you know, consult... de departements zouden beginnen te bouwen capacity in-house. Dus we weten dat... Dat de data dat ik heb is gewoon van de conversaties dat ik had met mensen die werken in de publiek sector.
Het is nog steeds nieuws, nog steeds nieuws. Maar het is nog steeds werken. Het is nog steeds werken om het werken te houden in de public sector te houden. Is het gewoon iets dat je decide? Do you just decide, as a government, as political parties, who want this? For instance, the next percentage of the money that we're now spending on outsourcing. We're going to pay our civil servants better salaries for that? Is it things so concrete and simple?
Of course, this depends on the government structure, the institutional setup of a country, which is why in the book we are careful to provide examples of things that seem to be working well without providing prescriptions. One of the things we call for is increasing or mandating...
Transparency around conflicting interests in the sector. That would look quite different in different countries. Because they have different systems already in play. But that's something that could also help you think. For instance... is just to make rules so that consultancy firms are obligated to disclose their conflicts of interest.
Ja, ik denk dat, als we in een democratie zijn, en we realise dat de acties van de government zijn accountable voor de citizens, of meer fundamentele, voor de politische politieën in een liberaler democratie, dan... What is required is for those politicians and citizens to have access to information about who is advising the government. It doesn't have to be, you know, in the kind of crazy amounts of detail. But actually, if a politician learns that a department...
is working with an organisation that actually earns a lot of income from the fossil fuel industry. We have a right to at least question our citizens and politicians might certainly be sceptical of that decision and move to change it. Ja, want er is een lot of secrecy, right? Surrounding de contract even. Like, wat zijn de exacte circumstances? Who pays?
En voor wat? En ook wat zijn de agreementen in termes van risk en liabiliteit? No, absoluut. Ik denk dat in sommige countries... Zo, zoals ik al eerder gezien, in Nederland, het is een... Er is een rule dat mandat private companies... ...to disclose financial information in a similar way... ...to publicly traded companies. That doesn't exist in most countries. So in the Netherlands we do actually have more information... ...about consulting firms.
dan we do in many other countries, which is great. But still we don't know much about who the clients are. And we also discuss in the book how... Many of these companies actually have a bigger... Research has been done trying to estimate where these companies operate around the world using LinkedIn data on their employees. So it's kind of rough estimates. And one of the things that this research found was that...
Quote-unquote tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions are one of the kind of places where these companies employ a lot of people, certainly more per. ...population size than anywhere else in the world. I think the Cayman Islands has more consultants per population than anywhere else in the world. Or more employees, rather, from the big four. Because they're so... in helping their clients with tax havens, tax evasion. The conclusion that this report comes to is that we have to assume that these...
Tax advisory consultants and auditors, that there are so many of them because they are at the heart of tax minimisation strategies. That's the conclusion they come to. It's not something we can definitively say because, of course, these are very difficult to study. Theoretically, er could be some other reason for having loads of consultants in the Cayman Islands. Yes, exactly. So yeah, I'll leave it up to listeners to come to their own conclusions. Yes, I'm sure they'll manage. Yeah.
Again, meer over hoe het verwerken of het verwerken. Ik denk dat er een belangrijkste ding, misschien niet alleen in de geld, maar het is dat de regering zou moeten worden een attractief employer zijn. talent, for people with relevant experience, for people with know-how. It's interesting because one of my former guests, Bert Hubert, his name is, he already touched on some of the issues that we're discussing now as well.
We hebben over de aden die de government plaatsen, als ze naar mensen kijken. En wat ze naar mensen vragen om te komen werken met de government. En de meest van het is om, ik weet niet of this translates to English correctly, completely, maar het is om politie-sensitiviteit, governance-sensitiviteit, dat soort turnen. En dan in response to dit...
We had another medium here in the Netherlands, de Groene Amsterdammer, did data research on those ads and actually saw that in the last 10, 15 years, less and less... Expertise was asked of people, content-wise, actual experience. And more and more, the standard was, are you politically sensitive? Do you understand this? de organisatie, de surroundings. Dat lijkt wel het opposite dat je nodig hebt, als je wilt meer controle om te gaan en worden owner van alle deze dingen meer.
Ja, ik denk dat je naar de eerste ding dat je zei, als dit is, als we hebben gezegd, een systemic problem. Dit is niet gewoon een issue. with the consulting industry. This is also an issue with governments and how we think about governments. So I think part of the solution is also, you know, how do we make, if we think about how do we make working for government attractive?
En in sommige countries het still is. In Denmark, lots of mijn peers, die ik in political science graduated with, many of them actually wanted to go and work for the government. It's still seen as a very attractive place to work. That's quite different to the UK. Part of that comes with changing our narratives. A big part of that in the UK, for example, is improving the pay and conditions of people.
in public service careers, because there has been a pay freeze in the UK in the public sector for a long time, I think for 12 years now. And in places like London, that... is not just a pay freeze in real terms. That also means that it's very difficult to rent places. It makes rent more expensive effectively. It makes saving up for a mortgage more expensive. So that is, I think, a big part of how, you know, thinking about...
How we make government a more attractive place to work also means that we have good conditions for people who work in the public sector. Of course, it also means, and perhaps there are lessons to be learned from the consulting sector here, you know, how do we...
...create the kinds of jobs that means that people feel valued. That they feel that they are able to have an impact. That they are able to continue learning and developing. And that they are recognised for being at the forefront of the green transition. Even if what they're doing day to day is super necessary critical work, but it might be viewed as mundane or whatever, how do we kind of create a sense that this is valuable, purposeful work again?
En dat is een beetje dat komt van de narraties, maar ook van hoe we gebruik voor public sector careers. Ja, je hebt de woord narratief nu een paar keer. En ik heb er nog dat ook. Een dilemma is... dat government, op de moment, is zo dysfunctional. Dat is een van de dilemmas ik heb, en ook van het onderzoek in het podcast hier. On the one hand, it's very hard to ignore all the problems and everything that's going wrong at the moment. And on the other hand, you would want to talk more about...
Het doesn't make sense to ignore that, of to paint that prettier than it is, I think. On the other hand, you'd want to talk more about how it should be, like how it could be perceived. In a way, analysing all these problems also contributes to the whole atmosphere of like, okay, everything's terrible there. You don't want to be there. No, I mean, you know, we're not...
The book by no means, and I think Mariana's work more widely in my research, by no means is intending to paint a kind of falsely... Rosy picture of government. We know that things aren't working in the public sector. And in many parts of government. But unlike in the private sector. The public sector.
is accountable to us as citizens. It's accountable to our needs and demands. It's our avenue. It is our vehicle for governing the economy. And we can use that vehicle. We can use the vehicle of government. ...to transform the economy. So why don't we? Yeah, but it still seems hard to describe it as something... You have to be pretty idealist, maybe, to...
...to go and work there now. And I think a lot of people who work there are. I get a lot of responses to this podcast from people who work in the public sector. Just often it seems like they're doing that more despite of the system than thanks to the system. Actually, I was speaking with someone recently who is a public servant.
in Australië. En ze is ook een PhD, een doctorat. Ze hebben een geweldig program waar ze encourage mensen die hebben gedaan public service careers te gaan doen in de civil service. Dus ik denk dat is great. We were talking about... hoe in dit kind of twisted way... We should have more faith in the public sector and the potential of the public sector than ever. Because in order to be a civil servant at the moment in places like Australia and the UK, you have to be committed.
het omdat je het publiek vindt, omdat je het probeert te creëren. ...public purpose or public value. We don't have to. We know that many people are in it for that reason. They're not in it for the money. They're not in it for the glory or the reputation. Because those things don't exist. So perhaps that's a way of...
We're thinking about it as a starting point, recognising that the people who are working in government, there might not be enough capacity, there might not be enough capabilities because they have been under-resourced or whatever, but at least the ambition is there, the direction is there. Het is hoe we bouw en groe dat. Ja, zou je even gaan terug? Ik ben, je hebt het uit daar.
So I worked for, I worked for, essentially, not an outsourcing organisation. I worked for the British Heart Foundation, which is a huge medical research funder that does cardiovascular disease. Okay, well, so not back, but would you always see yourself in academia or would you consider, after having done all this research and having thought so much about the proper way to do it...
Would you ever go into public service yourself? I definitely did. I never really intended to go into academia. That wasn't ever really my plan. I've long been very interested in the public sector. My plan... was to move to Denmark, where my husband is. When I moved from London, when I've been working in public policy, my plan was to move to Denmark to finish my master's, because in Denmark you need to have a master's before you can...
en ik heb mijn master's in politieke science en politieke economie omdat mijn plan was te gaan werk voor de danish government. Ik heb alle mijn classes in danish heel early op. So I got up to the required professional level of Danish to work in the public sector. And that was the plan. Things happen as they do, and the pandemic hit, and I became very interested in the different private sector actors that were increasingly involved in the response to the pandemic.
en ik met Mariana en ik realise, je weet je ook, als je werk in public policy werken, Partner of government. Of consultancy. Of within government itself. You don't have time often. To think about these big questions. That academia. Het geeft je de ruimte om te denken. Wat is de rol van deze dingen? En ik realise... Ja, ik zou willen werken in government, maar ik ook heel erg bedoel. Wat is de rol... Wat is de rol van government? Wat is het hier voor?
En wat voor de vrienden die aan de consulten zijn? Zijn ze nog steeds er? Heb je nog van ze? Oh ja, don't worry. We're still friends. We're still good friends. We have some good conversations, good debates, good arguments. Generally, my experience has been that my friends who have read the book, who work in consulting... ... ... ... ... Ja, want er zijn er een paar cynical bits in er als wel, right? About just recycling presentaties voor clients.
Dat type of thing. En zoals je hebt gezegd before, gewoon zijn erin in erin te rubberstamp de decision die al heeft already been gedaan. Er is ook veel cynisme, ik denk, waarvan, oh, je weet, of het gaat wrong, het is omdat de klient niet gehouden van onze fantastische advies. Het is ook een part van de culture. Absoluut. Ik denk dat je eerder, de mensen die we interviewerde voor de boek waren niet mijn vrienden. Ik denk dat je heel eerder bent. Er is een anonymous consultancy in de boek.
Je bent niet tegen ons, maar ze zijn definitivt niet je vrienden. No, ik weet niet, we hebben prozesses voor disclosing who ze zijn, dus ik kan promise je dat ze niet mijn vrienden zijn. wat ik zei zei. Het didn't occur to me, maar het is goed dat je het clarifte. Did je en Mariana hear back van de andere dingen van de industrie, zoals de management van de...
Ja, dus we hebben, dus niet de big, de big drie en de big vier hebben we nog niet alleen silent. We hebben heel veel, of we hebben nothing van ze. En we weten, voor example, when I was interviewed for... BBC Radio 4 documentary on the role of consultancies in our economies They also asked to speak to the Big Three and the Big Four to respond to some of the things that I and the other academics that we interviewed had said. And they essentially got no comment responses from...
We also know that because the BBC has a right of reply rule. If Mariana and I were interviewed about the book on a panel, it would be quite important that there was a consultancy there or a consultant from one of the big three or the big four to respond to us.
We were told by the BBC that they weren't able to get anyone willing to come and speak with us. What do you make of that? We know that there's been a strategy of silence, but the Management Consultancy Association... which is the kind of industry body representing consultancies in the UK.
The head of that organisation has written some responses to the Financial Times and the Guardian about the book. And everyone's welcome to read those responses. They're quite funny. I was going to say quite funny. They are quite funny. They're quite interesting. Were they funny? Wanted to have proper debate. We wanted to have proper challenge. What we don't want, or I guess it's what we expected.
...to obvious is for the sector to just come back and say, we do create value. This book is wrong. That's too easy. Come on. But your listeners can check out those letters for themselves. Ja, maar andere consultancies zijn heel erg responsief. Dus ik weet niet, ik weet niet of het is public, maar er is één grote engineering consultancy dat hij apparently purchased.
...many copies of the book for consultants internally... ...and is trying to use it as a kind of mea culpa. So a way of rethinking how they do their work. And probably that's a great thing. We never know. Perhaps it could just be a way of seeming like they're doing something bad, but perhaps that's not the case. We know with many...
Smaller consultancies, boutique consultancies, many individuals have been in contact with us and said, we don't want to become like the big three and the big four. What can we do to ensure that we don't create some of these problems that you describe in the book? So there has been a good response. Well, anyway, probably politics, government, the public have to make the first step for change. I mean, yeah, I find the book very compelling, but I'm very curious to see whether...
Want het is almost, ik weet niet, het is almost een addiction dat je beschrijft, of een abusive relationship. En dat zijn heel hard te krijgen. Dus ik ben heel curious om de trend te zien. Hopefully, as I said, we recognise, and I've been asked a lot, how do we transform this? We've been asked, what were you trying to do with the book? What do you think the book can do?
And I'm not so idealistic to believe that books and writing and shining a light on things is enough to change the world by itself, right? We have to be pretty... We zijn heel erg clear-headed about dit, ik denk, als academics en journalisten. Maar nonetheless, het is een belangrijkste step. Het is belangrijk voor raising public awareness en creating a public debate. Also, omdat we wrote dit book met civil servants in mind...
We know that many of these problems that we identify are things that people working in the public sector and business themselves already know this stuff. They know it because they've experienced it day to day, but they're often unable to challenge it or they don't have a kind of framework for challenging it. So part of what the book kind of wanted to do was also provide a point of reference for people who when they are trying to... they can point to.
Exactly. When they are trying to challenge decisions that are being made internally to outsource something to a consultancy when it can be done internally, then they have a book to point to and a framework to use when they're describing some of it. issues that perhaps they've already identified but don't necessarily have the words to challenge. Okay, well thanks so much for being on Rosie. Thank you very much, it's been a great interview. ***
Dank je wel voor het luisteren naar Stuurloos, een podcast van de Volkskrant. Te gast was Rosie Cullington. En als je de moeite waard vond, dan waardeer ik het enorm als je deze podcast bij anderen onder de aandacht brengt. Stuurloos maakte ik met Rinky Bartels, die onder andere al mijn... Liebelhoesjes moest verwijderen met Eva van Leeuwen, die zorgde dat we Rosie er vanuit Denemarken goed op hadden staan. En natuurlijk met Corien van Duin, onder wie er vleugels bij allen opereren. Tot gauw.
Zijn leven is overhoop gegooid. Plus dat heel veel mensen hem niet geloven. Vrienden niet, die denken hij is gewoon gek geworden. Als je vertelt over de meest indringende ervaring uit jouw leven en niemand gelooft dat je het echt hebt meegemaakt. Ja, ik vind zelf niet dat ik het verzonden heb, maar sommige mensen denken dat wel. Maar hoe kom je erachter of jij je doelwit bent van een geheime dienst?
Ik heb ook wel eens meegemaakt dat je het idee hebt dat inlichtingdiensten erin geïnteresseerd zijn. En dan kun je wel heel veel zien wat er misschien helemaal niet is. Als ik s'avonds nog iets ging eten, dan volgden die mensen mij naar het restaurant. En dan terug van het restaurant naar het hotel. Zij op een gegeven moment zei, ken maar uit, want anders word je dadelijk nog wat voert ook. Shit, ik moet hier weg. Dat is niet goed. Nu word ik gevolgd.
Een soort Truman Show is het gewoon. Alsof dat hele straatbeeld voor jou is ingericht. Maar dan wel met bedoeling jou niet door te laten. Dit kan geen toeval zijn. Een nieuwe podcast van de Volkskrant. Mijn naam is Simone Eleveld. En samen met Huid Modderko ontrafel ik een bizarre operatie van een geheime dienst. Wat het doel ook is. Jij verliest het. Ik werd opgepakt, heel lang ondervraagd. Maar hoe krijg je grip in een wereld die zo onderzichtig is?
Als je zou liegen, dan zou je niet de meest relevante informatie twee jaar later tussen neus en lippen doorvertellen. Er zal nooit iemand zeggen, oké Bart, ik geloof je. Nooit, nooit. Dit kan geen toeval zijn. Vanaf 3 oktober bij de Volkskrant. Ik weet niet of ik je ook alles kan vertellen. Het is echt te bizar. Wat? Ja.