BCG, Test and Trace and the £7,360 Consultant Day

The headline rate was the least useful number

A day rate is memorable because it can be compared with a salary. That comparison drove much of the public reaction in October 2020. For decision-makers, however, the rate on its own says little about value. The cost of an engagement depends on how many people are deployed, how senior they are, how long they stay and how often the work is extended. A modest rate applied to a large team for many months can cost far more than a high rate for a short, focused piece of work.

The Test and Trace record shows that distinction clearly. The reported first BCG engagement was about £10 million over four months. By the end of March 2021 the National Audit Office recorded £28 million paid. Across the programme, consultancy fees in 2020-21 were provisionally about £195 million. Those numbers describe different scopes, and none of them is a judgment on the quality of any firm’s work. Together they show why the right management question was never “What does a senior consultant cost per day?” but “What will this capability cost until we can run it ourselves?”

Emergency speed is a legitimate reason, with conditions

The government’s defence deserves to be taken seriously. In spring 2020 it needed to build a national testing and tracing operation quickly, with few existing structures. External firms can mobilise experienced teams in days, bring operating models from other settings and absorb work that a department has no capacity to staff. Daily testing capacity did rise from about 100,000 in May 2020 to 800,000 by January 2021. Paying a premium for speed in a crisis can be rational.

The condition is that the premium is temporary and managed. Emergency procurement rules allow direct awards because normal competition takes time. They do not remove the need to define what the external team will deliver, when the client will take over and how the transition will be measured. The Public Accounts Committee’s later concern was not that consultants were used at all, but that reliance continued long after the initial emergency.

Dependency is a measurable risk

Dependency can be tracked. The relevant indicators are not complicated: consultant headcount over time, the share of key roles filled by contractors, the number of civil servants recruited and trained into those roles, and the proportion of renewals that come with a reduced scope. The National Audit Office reported that consultants made up a large share of central staff in spring 2021, and correspondence with MPs indicated almost 2,000 were still working on the programme in November 2021.

A board or minister reviewing such a programme should expect a dependency dashboard alongside the delivery dashboard. If testing volumes rise while consultant numbers stay flat or grow, the organisation may be scaling its output without building its own capability. That is a choice, but it should be an explicit one. The France consulting-spend case shows how quickly a government’s reliance on consultants can itself become the subject of public inquiry.

Compare like with like

The rate figures in this story come from different documents. The £2,400 to £7,360 range was reported from documents seen by Sky News about BCG’s rates. Dido Harding’s later letter gave an average of about £1,100 a day across the programme and a highest individual rate of £6,624. The Guardian’s headline figure of £6,250 was not explained in its own article. These are not contradictions to be resolved by picking the most dramatic number. They are different measures, from different sources and periods.

The same care applies to annualised comparisons. Translating a day rate into a notional annual salary is a useful way to show scale, but it assumes a person billed every working day for a year, which consultants rarely do on a single engagement. It also ignores the firm’s overheads, which a salary does not carry. A responsible chart labels the comparison as illustrative. The business case calculator can help separate rate, volume and duration so that the total is explicit.

Outcome measures need an owner

The December 2020 audit report recorded that, on average, 41% of in-person community test results were returned within 24 hours, falling to 14% in mid-October, and that tracing call handlers were at times barely used. These measures reflect the whole system, including laboratories, logistics and public behaviour. They cannot be attributed to any single adviser. They do raise a governance point: when many external organisations share responsibility for an outcome, it becomes harder to hold any one of them to account for it.

A clearer arrangement assigns each engagement a small number of outcome measures that the firm can genuinely influence, together with the client owner who will take over that measure. The strategy recommendation slide builder can help frame such commitments as specific decisions rather than general aspirations.

What the public record asks of a consultant

When the client is the taxpayer, consultants should assume that rates, totals and headcounts will eventually be published, discussed in Parliament and compared with nurses’ pay. That is not unfair. It is the accountability that comes with public money. The firm cannot control how its fees are framed, but it can make sure that the work, the outputs and the reasons for the team size are documented well enough to explain.

The ICE detention-budget case concerns very different work, but it shares the same principle: public-sector engagements carry duties to people who never signed the contract. BCG was not accused of wrongdoing in the sources reviewed here, and the criticism was aimed at the government’s approach. The lesson for any adviser is still practical: design each public engagement so that it can be explained line by line, and so that it ends.

Build the exit into the proposal

The strongest discipline is to put the exit in the first proposal. Name the internal roles that will take over each workstream, the date by which they should be filled, the training or documentation the firm will provide and the point at which the team should shrink. Price the engagement on that plan, and report against it at each renewal. If the plan slips, say so and explain why.

The management consulting presentation guide recommends making the decision visible on the first slide. For a public emergency engagement, the decision to put there is not only what the team will build, but when the client will no longer need it.