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UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M
- aquir 8mo agosomeones got a new Bentley for sure and some expensive wallpaper from John Lewis...it is a shame that a country like the UK doesn't have a frontier lab and a frontier model
- beejiu 8mo agoIf it does upskill 10 million people just a tiny amount, £4.1 million is incredibly cheap.
- madaxe_again 8mo ago“If” is absolutely staggering under the heavy lifting it’s doing there. This will have as much effect as a gnat’s fart.
- beejiu 8mo agoClearly the site is intended for a few mega-employers to push out as "training". How many employees do you think need to take the training to recoup £4.1 million in GDP? Not many.
- samtp 8mo agoIt helps to read the linked article before commenting.
- beejiu 8mo agoJust because you read an article, doesn't mean you have to agree with it. (Yes, I read the entire article before I commented.)
- simgt 8mo agoAt one point in time the price of things was related mostly to their cost, not to some hand-wavy produced value.
- beejiu 8mo agoIt's not perfect, but this is the point of tender.
- simgt 8mo agoNo it's not, that's what happens when people can spend someone else's money without consequences, potentially by asking a friend what they need. That happens everywhere, all the time, but let's not pretend this is economically efficient or acceptable. If the request for proposal had been done fairly, that page would have cost a few tens of thousands.
- 293736729129 8mo agoThe regime is counting on you.
- FBISurveillance 8mo agoTerrible take. Would you be up for paying for groceries based on "value" you get?
- webdev1234568 8mo agoThis is the state the world is at. Scammers are winners.
- edoceo 8mo agoDamn, 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
- maccard 8mo agoIt 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 https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/021898-2024
- londons_explore 8mo ago> 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...
- edoceo 8mo agoI feel like code for public systems, government systems should be open source.
- hkt 8mo agoA 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 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.
- blibble 8mo agooh, so they got a better deal than usual...
- chpatrick 8mo agoThey could have used their AI skills to vibe code this for a few quid :)
- ahtcx 8mo agoThis has all the hallmarks of AI slop. Upsetting :/
- andy_ppp 8mo agoThe UK government want to write a cheque with our money for "Digital ID" whatever nebulous Tax + Services + Tracking that is... they can't even control costs on a tiny website, what is the cost of an everything site? Infinite pounds? Imagine what even a basic v1 spec for that looks like, it would probably never even be released. A reminder the UKs Test and Trace apparently cost £29.3 billion of the £37bn allocated. Disgusting waste of money. But at least Keir and the government will have cushy jobs to go to after they leave government.
- whenc 8mo agoTest, track, and trace. https://fullfact.org/health/NHS-test-and-trace-app-37-billion-instagram/ https://fullfact.org/health/NHS-test-and-trace-app-37-billio... "The NAO said that of the approximately £13.5 billion spent on the NHS Test and Trace programme in 2020/21, £35 million was spent on the app. The vast majority of the spending in that year was accounted for by testing (£10.4 billion)."
- andy_ppp 8mo agoThe statistic of £29bn was taken from this article https://fullfact.org/online/37-billion-test-and-trace-app-scam/ https://fullfact.org/online/37-billion-test-and-trace-app-sc... I still think this is far higher than comparable countries and seems like a rip off. Any of the figures are extremely wasteful IMO. I wasn’t trying to suggest the app cost billions. Test and trace is just the name of the UK programme (as used by fullfact and the NAO) so I’m not sure why you’re attempting to correct me on the naming.
- whenc 8mo agoI could have sworn your comment originally said "track and trace" not "test and trace". Perhaps not enough coffee.
- dizzy9 8mo agoIn the past, expensive contracts like this were handed out as rewards to Tory donors. Help fund the party's re-election, and your company will receive a cushy reward. See also the Cash-for-Honours scandal, where the Labour party were also found giving preference to donors in the selection for lordships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-for-Honours_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-for-Honours_scandal
- michaelt 8mo agohttps://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-pwc-ey-big-four-natwest-hydrogen-keir-starmer-secondment-staff/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-pwc-ey-big-four-natw... > Labour taking free staff from scandal-hit consulting firms > [...] The party has quietly accepted more than £230,000 worth of free staff from ‘big four’ accounting firms PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Ernst & Young (EY) since Keir Starmer took over as leader in 2020. Still, I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the ruling party was gifted £230k of free services from PwC, then brought a static website from PwC for £4.1 million of taxpayer money.
- plagiarist 8mo agoI wish a fitting comeuppance upon all the grifters taking up a seat which could've been filled by someone actually interested in governance.
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo agothese are exactly the kinds of people interested in governance. That's the problem
- aaronbrethorst 8mo agowhew, good thing Nigel Farage is a straight shooter interested strictly in good governance.
- defrost 8mo ago
- gerdesj 8mo agoThis effort is utterly dreadful. I started off from the press release on GOV.UK (as linked in OP and which is a paragon of virtue in web design) and followed the "Free AI foundations training" link and it all went south rather rapidly. Its bold, brash and horrible. It does look like a set of links and its not immediately obvious where you start or what to do with it. There are a few things that might be hyperlinks but the large weird rounded cornered sort of press me perhaps if you dare but I'm a bit flat and might kick your dog thing that might be a control or not but I'm purple and have an arrow ... ooh go on ... click me. Clicking around that area does move on to the next step which is just as obtuse. I do hope that clears things up!
- subscribed 8mo agoJust log in and see the courses. There are many, and some really good ones.
- _pdp_ 8mo agoLooks like it is based on invisioncommunity. It is not even a bespoke website.
- whalesalad 8mo agoImagine charging 4 milly for what amounts to a wordpress theme + module configuration.
- hluska 8mo agoI get the feeling you haven’t done much government consulting. The bill has nothing to do with the actual work; it’s meetings with stakeholders after stakeholder then coming out with a plan that will please everyone.
- enceladus06 8mo agoFollow the money and see who bribed who to get this ;). The website is made by PWC consultant in 1/2h with chatgpt.
- eranation 8mo agoUS: I see your £4.1M and raise you $2.1B [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#:~:text=estimated%20it%20at-,%242.1%20billion,-.%5B15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#:~:text=estimat...
- mtoner23 8mo agoTo be fair. Healthcare.gov is a lot more complicated. And has to integrate with marketplaces in all 50 states
- IncreasePosts 8mo agoMagnitude is also important. If you overpay by 100% on a stick of gum that's bad deal but I likely to have any large consequences for you. But if you overpay for your house by 100% you're probably in a world of pain
- sbstp 8mo agoCGI is a terrible company known for going over budget and under delivering on a ton of projects. Not that many companies bidding on large government contracts unfortunately
- throwaway19268 8mo agoI worked there for 3 years as a graduate and I can absolutely agree with this comment, the guilt of knowing my project (which was a failure from start to finish) was funded by taxpayer money drove me away from the company and made me swear to never work at another big consultancy again.
- dateSISC 8mo agoThis is so bad there should be a petition for this waste to be investigated in parlament
- Frotag 8mo agoAs an american it's pretty cool to see how citizens can force representatives to debate an issue. But it's too bad even the most popular petitions just have "lol no" as the response. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=all https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=all
- dateSISC 8mo agoif something is outrageous like this it's likely to come under the attention of someone who can raise the issue.
- marcus_holmes 8mo agoThis is pretty normal for government procurement, though. and in fact, most large organisation procurement. There's a whole wall of standards that the supplier must meet, e.g. ISO9000 that your little web-dev shop almost certainly doesn't. They won't buy from a supplier that is likely to go out of business. There's a ton of other criteria that you've got to meet to get the business. If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business. The civil servant has nothing to lose from saying "no" and runs a risk if they say "yes". Businesses that do meet these criteria charge like wounded bulls. In part because they know that all the other businesses that the govt could turn to will also charge like wounded bulls.
- OkayPhysicist 8mo agoISO9000 is, bar none, the most brilliant grift I have ever encountered. It's so simple, yet so elegant. Step 1: Come up with an incredibly easy to meet standard (because you don't want anybody abandoning the process because it's too much of a hassle) that sounds like a reasonable requirement on paper (to make it easy to pitch as a basic requirement of doing business). Say, "Have a plan for the things you do". Step 2: Add one additional requirement to your standard: "Prioritize Vendors that meet this standard". Step 3: Obscure the hell out of the standard, (to not make the grift too obvious) and stick it behind a paywall. Step 4: Franchise out the (nigh-impossible to fail) "approval" process to 3rd parties, who pay you for the privilege. Step 5: Your first few "standardized" companies put pressure on their vendors and customers to get certified, so they hire consultants, who in turn pay you, who tell them "Good job, you meet the standard. But do your vendors?". Step 6: Watch as the cash floods in. (Optional, Step 7): Once a bunch of major companies are certified, target governments to do your marketing push for you.
- gerdesj 8mo agoPlease show me on the doll where ISO 9000 hurt you! I have been an MD for 25 years. ISO 9001 reg. since 2006. Its been a bit of a pain at times but it does concentrate the mind towards doing things right. We've never used consultants, we've always just read and followed the standards. What is your experience? PS During our last assessment, the assessor described a few recent AI written efforts they had come across. Laughable. PPS I've been doing this for over 25 years and I think that a quality based approach to running a company is a good idea ... you?
- Oras 8mo agoWhen I checked the site this morning, the first impression I had was: They could have just linked to deeplearning[.]ai and that would have been much better. and that's before knowing about the £4M
- cmcaleer 8mo agoBetter yet, a link to Kaggle and provide prize funding for a few dozen competitions with most of them open to UK residents only. Directly incentivise the most driven types of people to compete and learn and give local firms a way to identify talent. But I guess donating another £4MM to PwC is more sensible.
- ctippett 8mo agoThere would've been an RFP for this, surely? Which means PwC was chosen to deliver this ahead of n number of other tenderers. I'd be curious to see what other proposals there were and the decision-making that went into choosing the winner.
- ebbi 8mo agoHaving worked in large corporates (and some government projects) issuing out RFPs, the final decision tends to go: let's just go with an established name like PwC even if they're more expensive (and given we have the budget approved already) as opposed to a small firm down the road that has a great portfolio, because if something goes wrong, I can say I relied on this big, proven firm, and not be criticized for using an unknown firm for such crucial work. It's frustrating, because these larger firms most always churn out subpar work and this mindset just keeps funding it so they don't improve.
- krapht 8mo agoI've seen some small firms crash and burn too, though. The problem is small firms are easy-come, easy-go; they don't have enough reputation at stake. Not sure what a good solution is.
- cmcaleer 8mo agoYou could have contracted 5 small firms for £400k each (which, for this project seems frankly seems excessive) and even if a couple failed to deliver you'd have gotten 3 separate products to choose the best quality one from, £148k to legally chase up the firms who failed to deliver, and still had £2 million left over. I agree a good solution isn't easy to come up with, but the status quo is certainly an outrageously awful one.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- deaux 8mo agoThere are dozens of "small firms" with plenty of reputation at stake. Or how about a "medium-sized firm". There's quite a few, probably a few hundred-thousand, options inbetween "PWC" and "my mate's nephew studying computer science".
- layman51 8mo agoIt is funny how they link out to Salesforce's Trailhead site. Personally, I think it's a cute site for learning, but have also recently come to realize how sometimes it used to have a lot of political content too. One example I can think of is they used to have lessons related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution popularized by Klaus Schwab. At some point, they retired those lessons. My guess is they were retired around the same time that Schwab had some controversial allegations surrounding him.
- adi_kurian 8mo agoThe only way this is defensible is if they contracted out thousands of hours of custom content. Which from a quick scan they might have. If not, this is, at best, a remarkably poor outcome for the price paid.
- navigate8310 8mo agoPretty sure there's some kickbacks involved.
- pbhjpbhj 8mo agoWe have an amazing gov.uk web team, they could have expanded that and built it in house with civil servants costing £60k ea per annum at the very most. £120k, double it for stupid amounts of testing, double it again for managers to tell the people doing the work "do the work". We're still only at £500k. Gov.uk web team are supposed to be award winning. Why are we picking shitty slop-corps to do this work?
- stuaxo 8mo agoUnfortunately because the top end of the salary is limited, to get people to work on stuff they need to bring in contractors to fill out the teams for many projects.
- marsavar 8mo agoThis is absolutely infuriating.
- jaccola 8mo agoInterestingly, the UK PM (and allies) just blocked a would-be political rival Andy Burnham standing as an MP. One of the given reasons is because Burnham is currently mayor of Greater Manchester, and running a new election there would cost approx £4m(!!) which is a huge waste of taxpayer money. I was surprised that they even gave this as a faux reason since it seems like the sort of money they would spend on replenishing the water coolers, or buying bic pens, or... building a static website!
- FridayoLeary 8mo agoBeing cynical i would say it's because Burnham could potentially challenge Starmer. Less cynically Labour has a big enough majority they can afford to lose this by election. The headache of replacing the mayor of Manchester is not worth it. Why can't he just do both jobs? Boris did it iirc.
- hkt 8mo agoIf memory serves, Dan Jarvis also did it, being both MP and mayor of the South Yorkshire city region or whatever it was called at the time. It is fairly innately political. No Prime Minister has ever polled as low as Starmer and come back from it, or so is being said in the press. Burnham might be a smart electoral move, but he's not a plaything of the Labour right, so they kept him out.
- owisd 8mo agoThe rules are inconsistent. You can be Mayor of Sheffield and an MP at the same time but you can’t be Mayor of Greater Manchester and an MP.
- petesergeant 8mo agoThat's not inconsistency in the rules, that's inconsistency in what being the mayor means. In Sheffield it means you show up wearing funny clothes every so often, in Greater Manchester it means you have a full-time job, a large budget, and actual responsibilities. For our American brethren, it's like the difference between being the Mayor of NYC vs the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade King.
- jaimex2 8mo agoEh, here in Australia we spent 96 million on the front end of a weather website. Estimated at $4 million originally. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology-new-website-cost-blowout-to-96-million/106042202 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology...
- pfych 8mo agoThis budget included a full modernization of their infrastructure as well as the website redesign. It's still heaps of money - but the media saying "a website cost $96 million AUD" is misleading.
- jaimex2 8mo agoI'd sort of expect them to replace every radar they had for that kind of money.
- camillomiller 8mo agoConsulting firms are a scam
- testing22321 8mo agoAt my last company (a telco that was government previously) they wound up paying $3 million for barely more than a Drupal theme for the public website. Fun project to be on. We played “descope” bingo… but everyone won all the time.
- DANmode 8mo agowhat was the barely more?
- testing22321 8mo agoA few embedded pages, a few login screen that redirected to other things. Less than a days work for any front end dev (I did it)
- stuaxo 8mo agoUK Gov has a whole set of standards for building websites, yet it seems sites like this get to opt out of this.
- seemaze 8mo ago>Do better. Feels so timely. May we all aspire to such a simple goal.
- boznz 8mo agoWait until they see the annual bill to maintain it..
- wackget 8mo agoI feel like the true scandal beneath all of these big government contracts is not necessarily the money spent, but actually how poor the services received are. I have worked with many "big agency" developers and can tell you categorically that they are more often than not absolutely terrible at their jobs.
- lifestyleguru 8mo ago"The software writes itself" and you're still spending £4.1M on a website? Website on nothing other than AI itself?
- cs02rm0 8mo ago"...while £4 million is admittedly chump change for the UK government..." I know this is just the author deflecting the clichéd argument, but I hate that argument. The pennies do matter, otherwise the argument is made ad infinitum and you end up with a financially inept government running up a £200bn deficit. These small websites should never be awarded to the mega-consultancies. Even if you paid the full £4m to a small webdev shop who'd feel like they'd hit the lottery I bet we'd get a better result and do more for the economy.
- ILoveHorses 8mo agoSo, it's not just my country who engages in blatant corruption like this!
- chrismsimpson 8mo agoAustralian Bureau of Meteorology: hold my beer
- __coder__ 8mo agoI think most of the cost is for handling and collaborating with the government org. As an engineer who worked with Gov orgs before, I can say it is not easy; imagine how many levels of approvals were given to put that site online.
- haritha-j 8mo agoNot many by the looks of the site
- zkmon 8mo agoJust the standard procurement. It's all about risk calculation. Award the contract to a branded company, because they tell you that no one got fired for buying IBM. From PwC side, "we already got the work, now just do the minimal thing to finish off the ceremony. Keep it crap and keep the work coming". Work comes back to you not because you have been delivering great products, but because they got locked into brand names and the mess that was created.
- vasco 8mo agoWhat is funny is that I know plenty of great engineers that won't earn $4mil ever in their life. For that amount of money you could give 4 guys $1mil each to create an amazing resource and take care of it for the next 30 years. I wonder how much PwC will charge for ongoing hosting and maintenance.
- punkbit 8mo agoNext 30 years? You are probably clueless about taxes here.
- StopDisinfo910 8mo agoEasy to be angry but I won't comment until I see what exactly was delivered. These projects often have a lot of extra. Just the development would be expensive but if they also worked on scoping and framing the platform, aligning multiple stakeholders (yes, even just linking outside courses mean you might have to interact with other parts of government or providers) and defining the long term vision and plan, it can get expensive pretty quickly. Doing anything with the government is a pain. It's even worse than working in a large company. You get paid very late. You have annoying contractual provisions. It makes everything very expensive.
- roryirvine 8mo agoThe full details of the tender are available from https://ukri.delta-esourcing.com/delta/respondToList.html?accessCode=92BQ84YEP3 https://ukri.delta-esourcing.com/delta/respondToList.html?ac... Not so much of the "long term vision and plan", but plenty of aligning stakeholders, as well as discovering, researching, and managing third party resources - and then there's the requirement to run the service for a further 18 months. £4m is enough to pay for about 15 consultants for 18 months at typical rates paid by the public sector. But since this is a standalone project, call it a dozen plus overheads. That feels roughly right as a finger-in-the-air estimate for a project of that sort of scope.
- thinkingemote 8mo agoYou can read the tender for the contract: https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/001337-2025?origin=SearchResults&p=1 https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/001337-2025?or...
- roryirvine 8mo agoAnd surprise, surprise, it's a lot more complex than simply "build a static website"!
- thoughtpeddler 8mo agoAnyone else surprised by how the actual training content doesn't seem to cover true fundamentals (even for a broad, non-technical audience) that would include basics like pre-training, post-training, weights, context window, etc? I get that we're all flabbergasted by the website itself, but it's not like the content is redeeming either. Here in the US, I should've learned my lesson when what came out of the White House "AI Education Summit" wasn't a comprehensive plan to teach Americans about AI, but instead just a cheap ploy for tech companies to offer coupons and vouchers to start using their services.
- jalapenos 8mo agoIt's very simple: if you're not spending your own money, so what? All other discussion is just noise. If you accept the idea that it's OK for the state to spend 50% of the economy, on things for you or your various self-congratulatory moral-high-horse programs, this is actually where the money will get pissed away to. It's all carefully avoiding noticing that socialism is theft because maybe you might get a sniff of the loot.
- bmn__ 8mo agoTo Mahad and people who share the same mindset: If "Do better" the worst you can say at the end of an essay, you made yourself inconsequential. Nothing will change, except everyone in the world starts mocking you for being so weak and agreeable in the face of people who in turn care exactly nothing about you and see you merely as an object to be exploited. Here's what Asmongold would say. Coercion and incentivisation work. Charge everyone involved at gov.uk and Pwc with fraud, from the decision makers top to the lower decks doing the actual work. Enact immediate severe and drastic punishment, put them in a box for ten years and let them work off their debt to society by turning big rocks into little rocks or something. If the law is a hindrance, just change the law. It's not a real thing, it's made up, a shared idea in people's mind. If the state officials do not want to enact the will of the people, then use the 2nd box of liberty to replace them with those who do want. Anyone thinking about enriching oneself by following example of the offenders should become deathly afraid to do so. Defrauding the taxpayer would stop being a widespread problem over night. If any of this causes a revulsion of abhorrence in your mind, then discharge yourself of social programming and put this into perspective. This is the reasonable and fair approach. They receive grace and get to keep their life. In other places and times of the world, they would simply beheaded and that would be the end of it. If anyone reading this just wants to down-vote out of disagreement in the typical fashion of left-extremist knee-jerkers, then be advised that this bad faith acting changes no one's opinion, you're just feeding into making HN an echo chamber for radicals and you put yourself automatically on the wrong side of history for anyone to see. Try your hand not being a dismal coward by actually engaging in discussion.
- matthewcford 8mo agoOnce you've done gov procurement, you can easily see why things like this cost this much. This is nothing. I've heard of large SIs charging millions for discovery work, only for the report to say the budget is not enough to build the project. Never mind the standards orgs tendering needs to meet (ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus). It's not for the faint-hearted.
- motbus3 8mo agoIt would be great to see the cost breakdown. 4m might seem a lot or not dependending on what was delivered
- em1sar 8mo ago[dead]
- punkbit 8mo agoKilling ourselves working, to pay huge amounts in taxes for this?