Customer Reviews
An absolute eye-opener! - By: Stefan, 24 Oct 2006 
After reading Rip-Off! this book was a complete eye-opener on the consulting industry in the public sector, & pretty much confirmed what I experienced.
An absolutely excellent read that will make your blood boil at the money squandering in government & make you get off your feet to do something about it.
The Famous Five Invade the UK - By: David Levy, 12 Jul 2006 
This is a detailed history, & a coruscating critique of New Labour's seemingly never ending & increasingly pathological infatuation with the major management & IT consultancies recycling their obvious & faddish nonsense round the world, with the UK providing the easiest & juiciest pickings. Given the near-universal commercial secrecy of the deals between the consultancies & the public sector, it is hardly surprising that there are some gaps in the costings - but Craig & Brooks seem to have come up with pretty good estimates from secondary sources & insider guesstimates. The numbers are jaw-dropping.
The authors clearly have a great deal of experience in IT consultancies (that Craig has worked in the industry for many years is irrelevant). Their account of the serial disasters in IT systems in the UK (Criminal Records Bureau, Inland Revenue, Child Support Agency, Passport Agency etc, etc) shows that New Labour is congenitallly incapable of learning from its ritual mistakes, wonderfully aided in their mass-narcosis by departments themselves widely invaded by consultants who increasingly rapidly whizz round the revolving doors between the public & private sectors, & who then magic up their own self-adulatory end of term reports. Only the Commons Public Accounts Committee emerges honourably as any kind of brake on the stupidity of government departments being taken in by this bilge, & it is the verbatim accounts of exchanges in this Committee that provide the most hilariously tragic paragraphs in the book. It's not the authors' fault that the exchanges are farcical (see earlier review); the questions asked are sound & frequently hard-hitting.
The almost incomprehensible gullibility & near-criminal wastefulness of procurement within the Ministry of Defence is outlined, but the most detailed case study is that of the NHS National Project for Information Technology, now callled Connecting for Health. From my reading of the serious press, this appears to be an exhaustive & accurate critique of the largest IT project ever undertaken - anywhere - & poised on the cusp of the most spectacular collapse of alll the many disastrous IT initiatives of this Government. But there ARE good things in the project, & some obvious solutions for preserving these, while ditching the useless & harmful, are proffered. Tragicallly, for a government so apparently obsessed with smalll business, the multiple smalll companies that produced so much niche & specialist software, much of it for healthcare, have been ruthlessly elbowed out by the new providers of gargantuan centralised systems.
Finallly, some broader solutions are explored. The USA recognised the gravy train as far back as 1996, & legislated to prevent the worse excesses of the consultancy industry; in addition, insider information is encouraged, with financial rewards for those who root out scams. In the UK, the consultancy industry appears, from this account, to be completely out of control, & New Labour is now so nearly coterminous with it that even if they were able to recognise the problem (which they can't), & wanted to extract themselves from it (which they don't), the absorption is now probably irreversible. Please read this deeply upsetting book, & get alll your friends in the Public Sector to buy it as well. It just might have an effect. All other hope is utterly lost.
Compulsory reading for all taxpayers - By: Paul Brown, 04 Jul 2006 I read this book because I read in the papers that the writers have been invited by the government to participate in a big enquiry into its use of consultants. Critics being invited inside like that doesn't happen very often so the book must have got something right ... The chapter about the NHS system is eye watering & should be compulsory reading for alll UK taxpayers. For a real laugh, see the bits about the Ministry of Defence trying to explain why its projects keep going over time & budget ...
Sadly this book addresses none of the issues. - By: Ben Dillistone, 06 Jun 2006 
This is an extraordinary book. It is a classic example of the worst tabloid journalism. Start with a view & then string together partial facts, sweeping generalisations, misleading use of statistics & conclude the answer you want.
There are very important questions to be answered about the use of consultants within the public sector but sadly this book addresses none of them.
I enjoyed reading the book but because it is funny not informative.
