I think the argument of private sector vs public sector for quality also comes with a price. As in, how much did that fancy UI cost the public, vs. how much (edit: it would have cost) the private sector to build.
I'm the tech lead for the NHS website (www.nhs.uk) and I oversee the team who are building this frontend library.
We have a full-time and fully-staffed team comprising developers, designers, user researchers, product/project managers etc. focussed purely on this piece of work.
In our role working to deliver health content to the general public we take very seriously the need for our content to be accessible to users and we invest accordingly. This frontend library is something we hope to push to other healthcare providers as part of a wider drive towards standards adoption.
None of this work has come cheap, but in the public sector we work to very strict budgets (and some would say lower pay) and I would say the public are getting very good value for money here. (We are judged by and required to provide proof of "benefits realisation".)
I run Torchbox, a small, private tech agency in the UK. We were commissioned by NHS Digital (the state sector organisation behind these tools) to support two related projects: moving NHS.uk to https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail and setting up https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/ on Wagtail.
NHS Digital's procurement processes are tight and focused. They have an expert in-house team of developers and delivery managers, and they only used us on where we could accelerate the project.
As a business owner, I would have liked a bigger contract. As a tax-payer and frequent user of the NHS, I'm very happy with their efficiency.
The impression I get is that the NHS is pretty efficient budget wise but with a budget so large it's easy to make the inefficiencies sound bad "NHS wastes millions on Foo" sounds much worse than "NHS wastes 0.001% of it's budget on Foo".
For people who don't know the NHS budget is approx £130bn (~$165bn US), they are a huge organisation that provides healthcare to 66 million people.
The cost to build something in the private sector is almost always cheaper than asking government employees to do it. The public sector "didn't build it" like you said, but if they had, it would have been cheaper. This is almost always the case.
It's worth noting that whilst the cost of producing something in the private sector is cheaper than the public sector, the cost of the public sector acquiring something from the private sector is orders of magnitude larger than the cost of doing it in the private sector. I always think it's rather odd that people who propagate the idea that the private sector can do things much better than the public sector simultaneously need to believe the public sector is better at negotiating contracts in order to believe that contracting out work makes sense. I think the key here is that the British government have reproducibly found of way of creating high quality sites. That should be examined, embraced and extended.
I'm guessing from the mention of "dollars" in your profile that you're American. Maybe don't extrapolate your experience in the US to a completely different country?
(I worked to set up a UK public sector website back in 2004/05. We cut our costs by 90% - genuinely, 90% - by bringing all development in-house rather than using private sector contractors. I do not believe your assertions to be consistently true in the UK.)
In the private sector, shareholders take money out of the system in the form of profit. Something that costs £X in labour and consumables must be charged at £X+Y% in order to make that happen and still give money to investors. If they can do it cheaper, they still charge £X+Y%, and give the surplus to the shareholders.
In the public sector, there is no shareholder. If it costs £X in labour and consumables, then the cost to the public purse is £X. If they manage to do it cheaper, then that money remains in the system and can be used to either improve the offering, or subsidise another project.
Public sector workers are also often paid considerably less than their private sector peers, and departments are often highly restricted in their ability to pay market rates for specialist employees.
Although the total benefits package for public sector workers has historically been equal to or better than their private sector peers, this has typically been due to Final Salary pensions, which have been mostly phased out in favour of Career Average or even Defined Contribution pensions, all without a corresponding increase in salary.
just fyi, nearly all government projects are contracted out to your accenture's, deloitte's, and booz allen's. most government agencies don't carry out and execute, they just put up the RFP and take whichever one greases the committee members best. that's usually how an actual 4-week front end project turns into a 40-person, 12-week contract.
No, that's just not how these new-style digital projects work in the UK (and the few that work the old way have a habit of hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons). I've been the delivery manager on two of them myself and advised a third. They're highly iterative, very committed to user research, user testing, and continued evolution based on real feedback. Contractors are certainly involved in most of them but there are also staff members in the teams in key roles. They start not with a big spec but with a goal and a discovery exercise.
