I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years.

It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy.

As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.

Then we get into actually building and owning tech. Look at the history of GDS - they were empowered to pay half decent salaries and build and own things, but then had budgets slashed and programs cut. Why? Because we can "just buy it". Yes, you won't own the IP, it'll cost 4x as much, it'll take 3x-5x longer, but at least you won't have "inefficient civil service bloat" to have to manage.

This all started in the 1980s, and there are signs of it swinging back. I was at one department last year where they were telling me they're thinking about hiring actual engineers and embedding some devops stuff internally - absolutely jaw-droopingly revolutionary. Genuinely.

I remember chatting with the then-mayor of Cambridge, UK about this.

Specifically, he bemoaned how well-intentioned anti-corruption measures meant that if they wanted to lean on a startup, it was practically impossible to do so. The risk that had been mitigated was that of someone like him giving money to his family or friends – which is an understandable risk to try to mitigate! But the net effect of that was that IBM got all the contracts at a wildly higher cost and with no ability to lean on small business.

In Estonia this was solved by moving all the IT related people to organisations adjacent to the ministries and departments, so the lower paid civil servants wont have to be compared to the highly paid software developers and architects, etc. One colleague used to work as and architect of the justice ministry. He said the suit wearing civil servants with law degrees were pissed off at the homeless looking sweatshirt wearing software developers who were much higher paid. So the IT stuff was moved to another new department, but it still answers to the minister.

Similar stuff with other ministries. Interior ministry has their own it department, where they develop and maintain the population registry, criminal registries, and stuff that requires a security clearance

The problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders. There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.

I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas about a similar concept in the NHS that would require the government hiring well-paid software engineers.

> This all started in the 1980s

It did, I'd argue the first (and in a sense final) nail in the coffin was the Electricity Act (1989).