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UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M

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Re: UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M

#22

Post by beejiu »

simgt wrote: post #17
beejiu wrote: post #8

If it does upskill 10 million people just a tiny amount, £4.1 million is incredibly cheap.

At one point in time the price of things was related mostly to their cost, not to some hand-wavy produced value.

It's not perfect, but this is the point of tender.

Re: UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M

#26

Post by andy_ppp »

whenc wrote: post #19
andy_ppp wrote: post #7

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. D…

Test, track, and trace. 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)."

The statistic of £29bn was taken from this article https://fullfact.org/online/37-billion-test-and-trace-app-sc...

I still think this is far higher than comparable countries and seems like a rip off. Any of the figures are extremely wasteful IMO. I wasn’t trying to suggest the app cost billions.

Test and trace is just the name of the UK programme (as used by fullfact and the NAO) so I’m not sure why you’re attempting to correct me on the naming.

Re: UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M

#27

Post by marcus_holmes »

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.

Re: UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M

#30

Post by londons_explore »

maccard wrote: post #18
edoceo wrote: post #3

Damn, I'd have done it for £4.0 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

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 di…

> The fact that it didn’t actually solve the problem is inconsequential to PwC

You are mistaken. The fact it does not solve the problem is good for business, because follow up contracts to resolve any shortcomings will most likely also be awarded to PwC, since they are the only bidder to already have the in house expertise on this bespoke site...

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