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Home Office deals with Deloitte and PA Consulting raise questions over Cabinet Office spending controls
The UK's Home Office has awarded two global consultancies contracts worth up to £350 million for data and analytics services, despite the government's commitment to spend less on consultants.
Deloitte has won a four-year deal worth up to £200 million to offer "strategic multifunctional teams" for data analytics, data matching and data insight services. PA Consulting has won a contract for up to £150 million for the same services over the same period, according to procurement documents published last week.
In November 2024, the UK government promised new controls on the use of consultancies across the public sector to cut unnecessary spending and save £1.2 billion by 2026.
The Cabinet Office and Crown Commercial Service said the controls were expected to provide far greater oversight, with ministerial sign-off required for any consultancy spend over £600,000, or for contracts lasting more than nine months. Consultancy spending over £100,000 was to be signed off by the relevant permanent secretary.
The Register has asked the Home Office whether the above contracts were subject to these controls and, if so, why they were approved. It has yet to respond.
In November 2025, the National Audit Office, a spending watchdog, said His Majesty's Treasury (HMT) lacked comprehensive data on government consultancy expenditure, potentially delaying progress toward "ambitious targets" to cut costs.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said in March that departments were not complying with Cabinet Office directives on consultancy spending, and compliance was not being monitored.
The committee called for a list of departments not complying with Cabinet Office requests on consultancy procurement, and a detailed breakdown of what each department spends on individual private contractors, categorized by type of service.
The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee recently published a report stating that government spending on contractors was one impediment to achieving its digital transformation goals. It said contractors in central government cost three times as much per year as civil servants, and across the public sector, contractors accounted for roughly 18 percent of headcount but 40 percent of staffing costs.
It called for publication of departmental plans to reduce the proportion of their workforce made up of contractors and the associated cost in digital and technology roles. Meanwhile, the government should create a digital workforce strategy to "deliver on the Prime Minister's commitment for one in 10 civil servants to be in technology and digital roles by 2030, as well as a definition of what constitutes a technology and digital role in the civil service," the committee said.
The government has long been told that lack of internal tech skills is a real problem. In 2023, the PAC reported on the barriers to achieving greater efficiency through digital transformation. Dame Meg Hillier MP, chair at the time, said the government's digital ambitions were "hobbled by staff shortages and a lack of support, accountability and focus from the top."
"The government talks of its ambitions for digital transformation and efficiency, while actively cutting the very roles which could help achieve them," she said. ®
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