Mike Jackson on Dublin Government Payroll?

17/05/08

éirígí chairperson Brian Leeson has denounced the decision by the Twenty-Six County Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs to award the tender for the ‘Review of the National Drugs Strategy’ to a firm with close links to Britain’s military and intelligence establishment.

The contract for the review of the strategy, which will cost the taxpayer almost €10,000 (£8,000) per week, has been awarded to British-based company PA Consulting. Among the people on PA’s payroll is Mike Jackson, the former chief-of-the-general-staff of the British army and leading architect of the British-US invasion of Iraq.

Mr Jackson is better known in Ireland for his role as a leading member of the notorious Parachute Regiment during the January 1972 massacre of 14 civil rights demonstrators in Derry city.

Leeson called for a reversal of the government decision:

“It defies belief that an Irish government can award a public contract to a company that employs people who have committed war crimes against Irish citizens. That the department concerned didn’t know Jackson was employed by PA Consulting when they offered them the tender is equally unbelievable.

“If the Dublin government has any concern for the many Irish victims of Jackson and his army, particularly the relatives of those killed on Bloody Sunday, they will reverse this decision.”

The éirígí chairperson also called for an end to the Twenty-Six County government’s reliance on extortionate consultancy agencies.

“It is a sickening irony that the Dublin government starved the previous Drugs Strategy of much needed finance, yet is now willing to lavish €10,000 (£8,000) per week on a company with very close links to Britain’s military and intelligence elite, who have used these contacts to profiteer on the back of the war in Iraq and who have also been involved in expensive and catastrophic failures in contracts within Britain’s public sector.

“There has been much debate of late amongst many of the conservative parties of the need for reform of the public services, which many will read as code for cut backs. Perhaps Brian Cowen might like to explain to taxpayers in the Twenty-Six Counties why their resources are being used to add to the already inflated profits of a company that oversaw a loss of almost £70 million (€88 million) to the British taxpayer.”

Plundering the Public Service

Under the terms of the contract awarded to PA Consulting, an assessment will be made into progress under the Twenty-Six county Drugs Strategy 2001-2008. It will also seek to identify priorities to be tackled under a new Strategy, to cover the period 2009-2016. The specification for the contract will require the company to attend meetings involving members of the Department’s Steering Group, along with departments, agencies and community and voluntary groups that have responsibility for the actions under the Strategy.

Among other things the consultants will be expected to:

“Assess written (including electronic) and oral submissions received from interested parties as sought by the Steering Group; report and draw conclusions on meetings with focus groups; report and draw conclusions on public consultation meetings.”

For this, PA Consulting will be paid an initial €151,000 (£120,000) over a four month period. This amounts to approximately €9,500 (£7,500) per week or €1,900 (£1,500) per working day.

To put this figure in context, a worker on the average industrial wage in the Twenty-Six Counties is paid approximately €133 (£105) per day before tax.

This decision coincides with government calls for ‘wage restraint’ from Irish workers and shows utter disregard to the taxpayer in how public funds are being spent, highlighting a growing trend where governments are increasingly employing hugely expensive management consultants to carry out work, for which those in the public sector are qualified, hired and paid to do.

A recent study of the use of management consultancies by the New Labour government in Britain carried out by David Craig in 2006 (Plundering the Public Sector) shows that, by the end of their third term in office, the British government will have spent £70 billion (€88 billion) on a succession of management and IT consultancy projects. Chief amongst those profiting from this windfall is PA Consulting.

£20million awarded to develop Britain ’s IDs

PA was hired by the British government to develop its controversial biometric identity card scheme, working on the ‘design, feasibility testing, business case and procurement elements’ of the programme.

The contract initially cost £10 million (€12.6 million), yet reports in the British media estimate that the work carried out by the firm reached close to £20million (€25 million). Indeed, David Craig found that PA was paid £5,000 (€6,000) per week for each individual consultant working on the project. A Freedom of Information request from Management Consultancy in Britain found that PA Consulting had 62 consultants working on the project alongside 43 British civil servants.

The British Home Office confirmed Craig’s findings, estimating that the average daily cost for each PA consultant working on the programme was a staggering £1,093 (€1,378).

Such is the level of profit accruing from the invasive biometric identity card system that Michael O’Higgins, a member of PA Consulting Group’s International Board and Head of PA’s Government Services Group, has called on other governments to adopt a biometric identity card system with the spurious claim that it would prevent alleged widespread identity theft and make life simpler for everyone. What O’Higgins neglected to mention was the massive profits a company like his can accrue from such a system.

And, with the ‘expertise’ gained in developing the British system, PA will, no doubt, be touting for business and proclaiming the virtues of a biometric identity card system that stores information such as fingerprints, eye scans and facial feature mapping.

PA Consulting profiles itself as a ‘leading management, systems and technology consulting firm’. It operates in more than 35 countries worldwide, with over 3,000 employees.

One of these operations includes a tax haven on the Cayman Islands. In typical management speak it claims to:

“Help our clients to design optimum strategies for growth, deliver effective IT that improves business performance, mobilise human resources, deliver complex programmes and major business transformations, and develop breakthrough products and processes through our unique applied technology capability.”

Perhaps this is what bamboozled the Department of Rural, Community and Gaeltacht Affairs to confer such largesse on PA Consulting.

According to the Department’s own specification for tenders, a weighting system is used to grade each tender. This highly lucrative tender was not awarded on the basis of it being the lowest costing tender. According to the Department’s weighting system, the successful tender scored well on the quality of the proposal, no doubt PA put its management speak to good effect.

Alarmingly, the successful tender scored less than half as well in relation to key criteria, such as the skills and expertise of the consultancy team, the track record/demonstration of similar work undertaken and the timeframe for delivery. It fared only marginally better in regard to the feasibility and credibility of the proposed approach and the proposed cost of providing the service. Given the daily cost of hiring PA Consulting, the tax-payer will be footing a considerable bill for any overruns on the project.

A track record of costly failures

PA has a reputation, not only for charging extortionate fees, but for monumental and costly failures. The most notorious involving the British public sector.

In 2000, PA Consulting was hired to advise the British government on the awarding of the contract to set up the Criminal Records Bureau, responsible for legally required criminal record checks on people working with children. On the recommendation of PA the contract was given to a company called Capita, whose mismanagement led to months of delays, causing problems for thousands of job applicants, a cost overrun of £68.2 million (€86 million) and, eventually, a recommendation by the Britain’s National Audit Office that the contract be renegotiated.

In 2006, the Management Consultancies Association awarded PA Consulting the best performer in the Change Management in the Public Sector category. The award was based on the company’s alleged success in “transforming and reducing the time the British Revenue spent on processing tax returns from five weeks to five days”.

What this meant in reality was the slashing of 4,000 public sector jobs. This was achieved using the infamous anti-union Taylorist ‘Lean Management’ system, whereby workers are essentially treated as machines or robots and every second of a worker’s day is systematically accounted for.

According to Nick Cohen of the English Observer newspaper, PA Consulting’s new management system involved:

“Dividing [the workforce] into teams and each member was given a tiny task to do again and again, day in day out. One would work solely on page 3 of a tax return, another on page 4 and so on, while supervisors strutted round the office chalking up each team's progress towards its targets. Lean has provoked strikes and public sector union PCS plausibly argues that the splitting up of work into tiny bits was a prelude to tax returns being farmed out to India.”

While the British Revenue made cuts backs of £105 million (€132 million) by making 4,000 public sector workers redundant, conversely it spent £106 million on management consultancy fees. This marks quite a success for PA and the world of management consultancy and a worrying time for public sector workers.

PA Consulting is involved globally in an array of sectors, such as defence, aerospace and telecommunications, utilising its close relationship with the British military and intelligence agencies to win a myriad of military contracts with the British Ministry of Defence and the British Government’s secret intelligence agency - Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ).

The invasion and occupation of Iraq has proved a boon for many British businesses, particularly those like PA Consulting who have close links with the British military.

Its recent hiring of Mike Jackson is evidence of its desire to deepen links with the British establishment, in order to boost its influence in securing even more lucrative contracts in the future.

A 2006 investigation by the London Independent newspaper and Corporate Watch found that British business has profited to the tune of at least £1.1billion (€1.4billion) from the first three years of the war on Iraq. The lucky firms include private security services, banks, PR consultancies, urban planning consortiums, oil companies, architects’ offices and energy advisory bodies.

Big businesses like PA Consulting have profiteered enormously on the back of the destruction of Iraq and the destitution of its people.

In recent times, the firm was hired by the British GCHQ to relocate its computer system to a new headquarters at Cheltenham in England. The relationship is so close that PA and GCHQ held a joint recruitment fair at the Cheltenham Racecourse last March.

Several of the firm’s senior advisers have addressed and chaired international conferences organised by the US Department of Defence’s Command and Control Research Programme. PA Consulting delegates have a particular interest in Network Centric Warfare and Network Enhanced Capability.

This is the type of firm the Department of Rural, Family and Gaeltacht Affairs deems fit to award €150,000 (£120,000) of Irish tax-payers money to.

Brian Leeson concluded: “The drugs crisis has ravaged working class communities throughout this state. The dedicated and committed work of community activists in addressing this crisis has been undermined by a lack of government funding.

“This situation led to the resignation of Fergus McCabe, a highly regarded community activist as community representative from the Drugs Strategy team in 2005. That the Dublin government can find sufficient resources to pay PA Consulting almost €10,000 per week is a damning indictment of where government priorities lie.

“I would call on Brian Cowen to review this process and end the practice of employing extortionate management consultancy firms, who know little of the situation affecting working class communities in Ireland. The resources available must be invested in local communities, where they can be most effectively used. The public and community sectors and service users are more than qualified and capable of devising a revised drugs strategy.”