The Government is missing out on hiring the skills of some of the top people in the industry, and as a result is being forced to pay up to 5x over the odds for sub-par skills recruited through the mess of inter-related Office of Government Commerce (OGC)/Catalist suppliers.
Why?
In order to work on most Government and related projects, you must have a security clearance, there are various types of clearance, but the most common requirement is SC, which we are told takes up to 6 weeks to obtain (it's actually supposed to be 30 days). You cannot get a clearance, unless you have already had a job requiring clearance and it's impossible to get a job without the clearance first.
The large OGC suppliers have all worked on Government projects and therefore have a large pool of security cleared staff. Never mind that these staff are not necessarily the best for the particular job requirement, they are almost always the only staff that will be recruited (at exhorbitant markups), because no one else has security clearance.
It's more than a year since the cabinet office issued this memo stating that advance clearance was only to be required in cases where the requirement is urgent and the term of the requirement is short. The memo also states that these circumstances should be rare.
I can't tell you who the wrong do-ers are. After all, the agencies will claim to be acting on the instructions of their client (usually another agency or OGC supplier). However, I can tell you that the practice is not only widespread, it is the rule, rather than the exception. Here is an example of yet another agency (in this case Spring, but I have many more) demanding advance clearance before even considering a candidate - clearly in breach of the guidelines issued last year.
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