Talent sharing in consulting – lessons from Whitehall’s £1.8 billion shared services reform
Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: the government is teaching the consulting sector a masterclass in innovation and efficiency.
While civil servants quietly unlock hundreds of millions of pounds through collaborative resource sharing, the global IT consulting industry continues to operate as if it’s still 2010, absorbing the cost of bench time, paying premium recruitment fees, and carrying highly skilled consultants between projects while demand sits elsewhere.
The irony would be amusing, if it weren’t so expensive.
Two years into the government’s Shared Services Strategy, the numbers tell a remarkable story. Eighteen departments and more than 100 arms-length bodies now share HR and finance systems rather than each maintaining their own costly infrastructure. The result is an estimated £1.8 billion in benefits over 15 years, including £500 million in direct financial savings and £1.3 billion in operational efficiencies, delivered from an investment of around £900 million.
The maths is straightforward. Instead of spending £1.7 billion replacing systems department by department, the government invested in shared infrastructure and unlocked long-term value by recognising a simple truth: different organisations often need the same capabilities at different times.
This isn’t revolutionary thinking. It’s basic economics. Yet the industry that advises the government on digital transformation has been slow to apply the same logic to its own operations.
The consulting contradiction
Consulting companies frequently talk about skills shortages, particularly in high-demand areas such as AI, cyber security, data, cloud, and software engineering. Projects are delayed, margins are squeezed, and recruitment is often treated as the default solution.
Yet at the same time, a significant proportion of highly skilled consultants are ‘benched’ between projects.
In the UK alone, bench time is estimated to cost IT consultancies around £3.06 billion each year in non-billable hours. On average, consultants spend 15% to 20% of their time unassigned, even as 81% of UK businesses report being negatively impacted by IT and tech skills shortages.
This is not a talent problem. It’s a utilisation problem. The talent exists. The demand exists. The connection doesn’t.
Recruitment isn’t fixing the issue
Traditional recruitment has an important role to play, but it was never designed to manage fluctuating, short-term demand at scale. Placement fees of 15% to 25%, lengthy hiring timelines, and permanent headcount increases are blunt tools in a market defined by rapid change.
The result is a hire-or-fire cycle that creates idle capacity during quieter periods, margin pressure when pipelines soften, and renewed urgency to hire when demand spikes again. This cycle is costly, destabilising, and increasingly misaligned with how modern consulting work is delivered.
This isn’t a technology gap or a capability gap; it’s a mindset gap.
A proven principle, applied commercially
The government’s shared services programme demonstrates a principle that is both simple and powerful: when organisations share capacity and improve visibility of resources, efficiency follows.
Consulting faces the same challenge, but in a faster, more commercial environment.
Rather than each company solving demand fluctuations in isolation, there is an opportunity for consulting firms to share under-utilised staff between organisations, turning idle time into productive, billable work while giving others immediate access to specialist skills without the friction of traditional hiring.
Talent sharing in consultancy
Organisations like BenchBee, allow consultancies to share vetted consultants between projects in a secure, compliant way. What began as a way to address bench time has evolved into something broader: a strategic workforce planning tool.
Increasingly, consultancies are using talent-sharing to protect margins during quieter periods, respond more quickly to client demand, reduce reliance on recruitment agencies, and scale delivery capacity without long-term headcount risk. In effect, it enables organisations to operate with the same mindset that underpinned the government’s shared services reform – optimising utilisation before increasing cost.
Why this matters now
The consulting industry is operating in a period of sustained uncertainty. AI adoption, digital transformation, and geopolitical shifts are reshaping demand patterns, while clients are under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources.
In this environment, efficiency is no longer a back-office concern. It’s a leadership issue. The businesses that thrive will be those that rethink how capacity is managed, moving away from rigid, siloed models toward more flexible, collaborative approaches that reflect how work actually flows.
The government didn’t unlock £1.8 billion in projected benefits by working harder or hiring more people. It achieved it by working smarter with the resources already in place.
Consulting now faces the same opportunity. The question isn’t whether shared models work, we have clear evidence that they do. The question is whether the private sector is willing to apply the lesson.
