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Comment by edoceo | Hacker News Reader

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

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Probably depends on the department. I do grant and loan assessments for Innovate UK, and they have a rigorous and largely (+) transparent method for assessment which I would be happy to explain in detail. If we award money, it's accompanied by a monitoring officer (I do that as well) who is subject area expert with project management business experience. The MO meets the project every one or three months to review progress and approve payment of an installation of the grant or loan. We certainly wouldn't hand over £4M without good reason!

(+ Some of the detail of the scoring matrix is not as transparent as we would like, but Innovate UK does take feedback and tries to improve it).

We (Devyce) just submitted our Innovate UK application - would be cool if a fellow HN user ended up working with us!

I'll have to recuse myself if the application comes across my desk, but good luck with the application.

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 didn’t actually solve the problem is inconsequential to PwC

[0] https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/021898-2024

> 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...

I feel like code for public systems, government systems should be open source.

A lot of it is! It has been this way for a long time in some parts of the public sector, eg:

https://github.com/ministryofjustice

I don't know of a department that does it as well as MoJ, though. Caveats exist around old private sector implemented systems like the prisons and probation databases etc, which even MoJ itself doesn't own the IP for. But everything made by civil servants or contractors at MoJ ends up published in that org unless there's a good reason not to.

Edit: FOI in principle allows you to request a cut of a git repo etc for a service, so you can impose annoyance upon departments that are less open.

https://github.com/govuk-one-login

Some of it is

I'm not quite as cynical as that to be honest. I do think it's abundantly clear that PwC and other major consultancies hire people who have experience in writing briefs to get major projects, and that they likely have an implicit preferential treatment becacuse they meet things like insurance requirements already without any overhead. It's also clear, allowed (and provable) that they will start with senior people who can make a good point and sell a good story, but will swap them out as soon as possible.

I think at that point, they just don't care.

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