UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M

This is pretty normal for government procurement, though. and in fact, most large organisation procurement. There's a whole wall of standards that the supplier must meet, e.g. ISO9000 that your little web-dev shop almost certainly doesn't. They won't buy from a supplier that is likely to go out of business. There's a ton of other criteria that you've got to meet to get the business. If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business. The civil servant has nothing to lose from saying "no" and runs a risk if they say "yes".

Businesses that do meet these criteria charge like wounded bulls. In part because they know that all the other businesses that the govt could turn to will also charge like wounded bulls.

In the past, expensive contracts like this were handed out as rewards to Tory donors. Help fund the party's re-election, and your company will receive a cushy reward. See also the Cash-for-Honours scandal, where the Labour party were also found giving preference to donors in the selection for lordships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-for-Honours_scandal

Interestingly, the UK PM (and allies) just blocked a would-be political rival Andy Burnham standing as an MP.

One of the given reasons is because Burnham is currently mayor of Greater Manchester, and running a new election there would cost approx £4m(!!) which is a huge waste of taxpayer money.

I was surprised that they even gave this as a faux reason since it seems like the sort of money they would spend on replenishing the water coolers, or buying bic pens, or... building a static website!

You can read the tender for the contract:

https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/001337-2025?or...

I feel like the true scandal beneath all of these big government contracts is not necessarily the money spent, but actually how poor the services received are.

I have worked with many "big agency" developers and can tell you categorically that they are more often than not absolutely terrible at their jobs.

The only way this is defensible is if they contracted out thousands of hours of custom content. Which from a quick scan they might have. If not, this is, at best, a remarkably poor outcome for the price paid.

This is so bad there should be a petition for this waste to be investigated in parlament

Once you've done gov procurement, you can easily see why things like this cost this much. This is nothing.

I've heard of large SIs charging millions for discovery work, only for the report to say the budget is not enough to build the project.

Never mind the standards orgs tendering needs to meet (ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus). It's not for the faint-hearted.

This is the state the world is at.

Scammers are winners.

There would've been an RFP for this, surely? Which means PwC was chosen to deliver this ahead of n number of other tenderers. I'd be curious to see what other proposals there were and the decision-making that went into choosing the winner.

UK Gov has a whole set of standards for building websites, yet it seems sites like this get to opt out of this.

Anyone else surprised by how the actual training content doesn't seem to cover true fundamentals (even for a broad, non-technical audience) that would include basics like pre-training, post-training, weights, context window, etc? I get that we're all flabbergasted by the website itself, but it's not like the content is redeeming either. Here in the US, I should've learned my lesson when what came out of the White House "AI Education Summit" wasn't a comprehensive plan to teach Americans about AI, but instead just a cheap ploy for tech companies to offer coupons and vouchers to start using their services.

It is funny how they link out to Salesforce's Trailhead site. Personally, I think it's a cute site for learning, but have also recently come to realize how sometimes it used to have a lot of political content too. One example I can think of is they used to have lessons related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution popularized by Klaus Schwab. At some point, they retired those lessons. My guess is they were retired around the same time that Schwab had some controversial allegations surrounding him.

Looks like it is based on invisioncommunity. It is not even a bespoke website.

Damn, I'd have done it for £4.0

There is this thing that happens in USA where RFPs are issued in such a way only one vendor could pass the mark - does that happen in UK? Reckon PwC has connections to make that happen

We have an amazing gov.uk web team, they could have expanded that and built it in house with civil servants costing £60k ea per annum at the very most.

£120k, double it for stupid amounts of testing, double it again for managers to tell the people doing the work "do the work". We're still only at £500k.

Gov.uk web team are supposed to be award winning. Why are we picking shitty slop-corps to do this work?

Just the standard procurement. It's all about risk calculation. Award the contract to a branded company, because they tell you that no one got fired for buying IBM. From PwC side, "we already got the work, now just do the minimal thing to finish off the ceremony. Keep it crap and keep the work coming". Work comes back to you not because you have been delivering great products, but because they got locked into brand names and the mess that was created.

US: I see your £4.1M and raise you $2.1B [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#:~:text=estimat...

It would be great to see the cost breakdown. 4m might seem a lot or not dependending on what was delivered

They could have used their AI skills to vibe code this for a few quid :)

When I checked the site this morning, the first impression I had was: They could have just linked to deeplearning[.]ai and that would have been much better.

and that's before knowing about the £4M

I think most of the cost is for handling and collaborating with the government org. As an engineer who worked with Gov orgs before, I can say it is not easy; imagine how many levels of approvals were given to put that site online.

"...while £4 million is admittedly chump change for the UK government..."

I know this is just the author deflecting the clichéd argument, but I hate that argument. The pennies do matter, otherwise the argument is made ad infinitum and you end up with a financially inept government running up a £200bn deficit.

These small websites should never be awarded to the mega-consultancies. Even if you paid the full £4m to a small webdev shop who'd feel like they'd hit the lottery I bet we'd get a better result and do more for the economy.

someones got a new Bentley for sure and some expensive wallpaper from John Lewis...it is a shame that a country like the UK doesn't have a frontier lab and a frontier model

Follow the money and see who bribed who to get this ;). The website is made by PWC consultant in 1/2h with chatgpt.

This effort is utterly dreadful.

I started off from the press release on GOV.UK (as linked in OP and which is a paragon of virtue in web design) and followed the "Free AI foundations training" link and it all went south rather rapidly.

Its bold, brash and horrible. It does look like a set of links and its not immediately obvious where you start or what to do with it.

There are a few things that might be hyperlinks but the large weird rounded cornered sort of press me perhaps if you dare but I'm a bit flat and might kick your dog thing that might be a control or not but I'm purple and have an arrow ... ooh go on ... click me. Clicking around that area does move on to the next step which is just as obtuse.

I do hope that clears things up!

Easy to be angry but I won't comment until I see what exactly was delivered. These projects often have a lot of extra.

Just the development would be expensive but if they also worked on scoping and framing the platform, aligning multiple stakeholders (yes, even just linking outside courses mean you might have to interact with other parts of government or providers) and defining the long term vision and plan, it can get expensive pretty quickly.

Doing anything with the government is a pain. It's even worse than working in a large company. You get paid very late. You have annoying contractual provisions. It makes everything very expensive.

Pretty sure there's some kickbacks involved.

What is funny is that I know plenty of great engineers that won't earn $4mil ever in their life. For that amount of money you could give 4 guys $1mil each to create an amazing resource and take care of it for the next 30 years. I wonder how much PwC will charge for ongoing hosting and maintenance.

oh, so they got a better deal than usual...

The UK government want to write a cheque with our money for "Digital ID" whatever nebulous Tax + Services + Tracking that is... they can't even control costs on a tiny website, what is the cost of an everything site? Infinite pounds? Imagine what even a basic v1 spec for that looks like, it would probably never even be released.

A reminder the UKs Test and Trace apparently cost £29.3 billion of the £37bn allocated. Disgusting waste of money.

But at least Keir and the government will have cushy jobs to go to after they leave government.

>Do better.

Feels so timely. May we all aspire to such a simple goal.

"The software writes itself" and you're still spending £4.1M on a website? Website on nothing other than AI itself?

Australian Bureau of Meteorology: hold my beer

Wait until they see the annual bill to maintain it..

At my last company (a telco that was government previously) they wound up paying $3 million for barely more than a Drupal theme for the public website.

Fun project to be on. We played “descope” bingo… but everyone won all the time.

Consulting firms are a scam

So, it's not just my country who engages in blatant corruption like this!

This is absolutely infuriating.

Eh, here in Australia we spent 96 million on the front end of a weather website. Estimated at $4 million originally.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology...

It's very simple: if you're not spending your own money, so what?

All other discussion is just noise.

If you accept the idea that it's OK for the state to spend 50% of the economy, on things for you or your various self-congratulatory moral-high-horse programs, this is actually where the money will get pissed away to.

It's all carefully avoiding noticing that socialism is theft because maybe you might get a sniff of the loot.

To Mahad and people who share the same mindset: If "Do better" the worst you can say at the end of an essay, you made yourself inconsequential. Nothing will change, except everyone in the world starts mocking you for being so weak and agreeable in the face of people who in turn care exactly nothing about you and see you merely as an object to be exploited.

Here's what Asmongold would say. Coercion and incentivisation work. Charge everyone involved at gov.uk and Pwc with fraud, from the decision makers top to the lower decks doing the actual work. Enact immediate severe and drastic punishment, put them in a box for ten years and let them work off their debt to society by turning big rocks into little rocks or something. If the law is a hindrance, just change the law. It's not a real thing, it's made up, a shared idea in people's mind. If the state officials do not want to enact the will of the people, then use the 2nd box of liberty to replace them with those who do want. Anyone thinking about enriching oneself by following example of the offenders should become deathly afraid to do so. Defrauding the taxpayer would stop being a widespread problem over night.

If any of this causes a revulsion of abhorrence in your mind, then discharge yourself of social programming and put this into perspective. This is the reasonable and fair approach. They receive grace and get to keep their life. In other places and times of the world, they would simply beheaded and that would be the end of it.

If anyone reading this just wants to down-vote out of disagreement in the typical fashion of left-extremist knee-jerkers, then be advised that this bad faith acting changes no one's opinion, you're just feeding into making HN an echo chamber for radicals and you put yourself automatically on the wrong side of history for anyone to see. Try your hand not being a dismal coward by actually engaging in discussion.

If it does upskill 10 million people just a tiny amount, £4.1 million is incredibly cheap.