Public health consultants paid £3k a day in pandemic

Total daily cost of hiring outside staff may have been up to £1.8m as department criticised by accounts body

PUBLIC health officials have admitted paying more than 2,500 management consultants up to £3,100-a-day during the height of the pandemic.

Dame Jenny Harries, the head of the UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA), told MPS that they were still employing nearly 1,500 private contractors at an average day rate of £1,244 – roughly seven times higher than the average wage.

At the last count, at the beginning of February, management consultants made up one in seven of the UKHSA’S workforce, the public accounts committee was told.

The organisation has been heavily criticised for spending so much on outside help, and last year promised to bring more work in-house to cut costs after it emerged it was spending £1million a day on consultants.

But the figures suggest the daily spend had risen closer to £1.8million by February as the UKHSA called in even more consultants during the omicron wave. Dame Jenny admitted that management consultants were employed at rates between £706 and £3,100-a-day.

At the public accounts committee yesterday, James Wild, the Conservative MP for North West Norfolk, asked: “What does someone do for £3,100 a today? My constituents would want to see this spend come down rapidly.”

Dame Jenny said that there were very few people on the highest rates but admitted the top wages were being paid to “partners and directors” who were overseeing complex digital projects.

“All of those costs, while I know they will feel to many public viewers very high, are standard contract costs,” she said.

“These are partners or directors who might be overseeing, for example, transfer of national digital infrastructure, areas of work which are not typical Civil Service ones. Trying to move systems across.

“We are coming down [in the numbers of consultants], we did have to ramp up a little bit in response to the omicron wave.

“Normally you would wish to remove your consultants and move to a stable workforce.”

Dame Jenny could not say how much the UKHSA was spending every month on management consultants but promised to supply the figures to the committee.

Members also criticised the Department of Health and the UKHSA for paying more than £50million to the company Oxford Nanopore, which was asked to develop Covid tests that were never used.

Shona Dunn, the second permanent secretary at the Department of Health, said the full spend was closer to £84million. “This is a very substantial amount of money and the questions around the value for money have been high in our mind,” she said.