“Services which are essential to our wellbeing and quality of life: attractive and affordable housing, 21st-century hospital treatment, quality education for the young, care for the sick and elderly, safe and clean neighbourhoods and lifelong opportunities for learning and self-improvement.”

Has this list been cut and pasted from Labour’s last general election manifesto? Or the Conservatives’? Not quite. It is from the corporate “profile” page of the website of Tribal Group plc, a consulting firm set up in 1999 with a staff of three. Tribal now employs 2,200 people. It was the second fastest-growing company to be floated on the London Stock Exchange between 1998 and 2002. And, as it proudly notes, the vast majority of its clients are in the public sector; from watchdogs and the Department for Education to NHS trusts, it has more than 2,500 of them.

There is nothing wrong with contracting out the delivery of public services to the private sector. As the Conservatives were the first to prove, it can be the quickest, cheapest way of maximising taxpayers’ value for money. Nor is there anything fundamentally malign about consultants. Hired for appropriate tasks, they can inject dynamism and expertise into large, sclerotic organisations — public or private — that are unable to reform themselves from within.

But consultants are no panacaea. If they were, the astonishing growth of specialist public sector consultancies within the life of this Government would have been accompanied by a commensurate leap in the quality of public services. And there would be no need or market for studies of public sector consulting such as the one from which we publish an extract on our business pages today. Instead, government agencies from the Cabinet Office to the humblest quango have developed an expensive habit of bypassing the Civil Service to commission research and advice from consultancies charging up to £20,000 per consultant per week. Further billions have been spent on disastrously managed public sector IT projects.

This Government had no choice but to adapt vast public enterprises to the age of broadband, at private sector prices. Occasionally, as in Transport for London’s contract with Capita to administer the congestion charge, the “win-win” at the heart of so much consultant-speak has materialised. Usually, it has not. Customs & Excise spent £100 million over four years on an “e-VAT” service used by barely 1 per cent of traders. The Health and Safety Executive has spent £52 million, more than six times its original budget for the project, to computerise its “payroll and related services” system, and the computerisation of the NHS has yet to deliver any of the patient choice on which Tony Blair’s reforms of the service depend.

His Government’s addiction to management consultants is still more alarming. Stubborn permanent secretaries can, in the manner of Sir Humphrey Appleby, be serious obstacles to reform. But last year, public sector use of management consultants rose ten times faster than in the private sector. This cannot be wise. It is, more plausibly, old Labour’s traditional suspicion of the Civil Service in a new guise. The upshot is a £2 billion-a-year reflex to outsource government to a biddable corporate technocracy with no incentive to tell ministers when they are wrong. And too often they are wrong.