We need to talk more about London. More specifically, we need to talk about the business consulting industry that resides there, and the role it plays within the UK’s business ecosystem. In 2023, the business consulting sector alone contributed over £20bn to the UK economy, a value which has doubled within five years. According to The Global City, over 1.4mn UK employees work in this sector, with over 500,000 in management consultancy alone.
On a surface level, this is fantastic. Most countries that aspire for economic success need to specialise and create jobs en masse in certain industries in order to attract foreign direct investment and provide people with opportunities. Consulting firms also offer graduates without overtly technical degrees access to well-paid jobs. All the better when the industry in question is resistant to geopolitical developments–consulting will always be desired by high-end firms and ticks many boxes for the UK government. However, the outlook becomes more multi-faceted once we delve deeper into what these companies actually do.
Business consulting could be defined as when a business or individual advises a client company on strategies for “improvement” or “optimisation”, in areas like workforce management, procurement, or marketing. And as already mentioned, the UK (particularly London) is a global heavyweight in this domain. On the other hand, something immediately stands out. Consulting doesn’t really produce anything. Its principal objective is to maximise client shareholder profits, which may not often translate into the client delivering better services in its own field, or increased wages for its employees.
The importance of this is palpable when we look at the status quo in the UK today. The NHS is on its knees. Public transport is often unreliable, while infrastructure projects trundle along, consistently years behind schedule. There are fundamental labour shortages in industries such as education and engineering. It is somewhat disheartening to see the growth of industries like consulting, which do nothing to address any of the aforementioned shortcomings we are witnessing. And even in rarer cases when business consultants are commissioned in the public sector, their recommendations may not always translate to improved service, as already mentioned. Would it not be better for the UK’s brightest minds to be employed within these sectors instead of sporadically advising them from afar? Changing employment patterns in a 70-million-people–strong country doesn’t happen overnight, and the most astute workers will understandably gravitate to the most lucrative jobs. In light of this, the UK government ought to understand this flux of labour and consider how it can best nurture our health, education, or engineering sectors (be it through higher wages, subsidised degree programmes, or more widely available apprenticeships), to attract graduates back into these fields. If it doesn’t, our public sector has little chance of escaping the rut in which it finds itself.