The Cabinet Office has rewritten its Consultancy Playbook, removing the dead Whitehall unit this site found in September. It still cannot fix the harder gap its own auditor found: what government actually spends on consultants.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
In short. This site's 12 September teardown found the Consultancy Playbook still directing civil servants to the Government Consulting Hub, a unit that closed in January 2023 [1]. The Cabinet Office has now published Version 2.0, dated 6 November 2026, with a note that it "replaced all documents with updated versions" [2]. Four of the five mistakes this site documented are gone from the new text. The fifth is not: the National Audit Office's finding that government cannot produce a consistent figure for its own consultancy spending is not addressed by anything in the refresh. One documented mistake: four stars.
Twelve weeks ago this site tested the Consultancy Playbook against its own cited evidence and found a document built around an office, the Government Consulting Hub, that the Cabinet Office had closed for its own headcount reasons four months after the Playbook was published [1]. On 6 November 2026, GOV.UK's own update log for the Playbook's publication page recorded its first entry since September 2022: "Replaced all documents with updated versions" [2]. The replacement is Version 2.0, a 56-page PDF, alongside a refreshed companion guidance note and a new annex of definitions [3]. This is a diff on a document this site has already torn down, so it gets tested the same way: the new document's own words, checked against what it cites.
What the Cabinet Office fixed
The Government Consulting Hub does not appear anywhere in Version 2.0. In its place, the Playbook now names a real, live service and a real address. "Teams should contact the Resourcing team (PROSPER) for guidance and support when going to market" [3], and, further in, "For further support and advice on writing your specification, you can contact GCA PROSPER at prosper@gca.gov.uk" (page 27) [3]. PROSPER sits inside the Government Commercial Agency, formed on 1 April 2026 when Crown Commercial Service combined with several Cabinet Office central commercial teams, a creation date and parentage GCA's own site confirms [8]. The companion Knowledge and Skills Guidance Note, previously pointing to the same dead Hub, now tells readers to "contact the Markets, Sourcing and Suppliers Team in the Government Commercial Agency via markets-sourcing-suppliers@gca.gov.uk" (page 2) [4]. The guidance note's knowledge-transfer model has also changed shape: rather than routing teams to a shared Knowledge Exchange platform, the kind the NAO said was "discontinued" when the Hub closed, it now builds knowledge-transfer obligations directly into project specifications, owned by the contracting team rather than a central platform that no longer exists.
The Playbook also now names a live spending control. "Departments have been asked to bring in the following internal controls on consultancy and professional services... spend over £600,000, or contracts with a duration of over 9 months require Ministerial approval... spend over £100,000, or contracts with a duration of over 3 months require relevant Accounting Officer approval" (page 4) [3]. These are not new rules invented for this refresh; GOV.UK announced them on 14 November 2024, almost two years before this Playbook update, as part of a package to "curb consultancy spend and save over £1.2 billion by 2026" [7]. What V1.1 lacked was any mention of them at all: a reader following the September 2022 text, as this site found, had no sign that "comply or explain" meant anything beyond departmental discretion. V2.0 closes that specific gap, two years late, by finally writing down a control that already existed.
The gap that is still open
Version 2.0 repeats a promise the original Playbook also made and the NAO found undelivered. It asks contracting authorities to ensure "extended workforce needs to be categorised and declared accurately, to drive transparency in how much government spends on different types of extended workforce services" (page 7) [3]. A new annex backs this with definitions: consultancy is "provision of advice to fill a knowledge gap", distinct from contingent labour, which refers to "workers who are used to fill existing in-house roles... for a fixed term" (page 2) [5]. Those are definitions for choosing the right sourcing route on a single procurement. They are not the thing the National Audit Office said was missing.
The NAO's November 2025 review, the same report this site cited against the original Playbook, put it plainly: "the government does not have a clear picture of how much is being spent on consultants or how this spending has changed over time" (paragraph 13), because "HM Treasury receives spending data from departments that differ from departments' published accounts, private-sector commercial analysis platforms like Tussell or Oxygen Finance Insights, and spend management software used in government" [6]. Those sources, the NAO found, "varied by an average of £270 million per year between 2017-18" and 2022-23 [6]. Critically, the NAO traced the cause: "Departmental annual reports use different definitions of what constitutes consultancy spending, which may or may not be based on the Cabinet Office definition for consultancy" [6]. The problem is not that no definition exists; the Cabinet Office has one, and now a longer one in Annex 1. The problem is that nothing obliges departments to use it when they report spend to HM Treasury or in their own annual accounts. Version 2.0 asks teams, again, to "categorise, declare and report this spend accurately" [3]. It does not say who checks that they did, or reconcile its own definitions with the reporting lines the NAO named.
The claims, tested
| What the original Playbook got wrong | What Version 2.0 says now | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Directed teams to the Government Consulting Hub for triage, closed since January 2023 [1] | Names GCA PROSPER throughout, with a working contact address, prosper@gca.gov.uk [3] | Fixed |
| Called the GCH Knowledge Exchange "essential infrastructure" for a platform the NAO found discontinued [1] | No Knowledge Exchange reference; knowledge transfer is now written into the specification itself [4] | Fixed |
| Guidance note's contact address sat on the closed Hub's own domain [1] | New address at markets-sourcing-suppliers@gca.gov.uk [4] | Fixed |
| "Comply or explain" named no body that enforces it, after central controls were withdrawn in 2023 [1] | Now names the Ministerial/£600,000 and Accounting Officer/£100,000 thresholds, live since November 2024 [3] [7] | Fixed, two years late |
| Asked for accurate, comparable spend data; NAO found departmental definitions inconsistent by an average £270 million a year [6] | Repeats the same request for accurate categorisation, with sourcing definitions in a new annex; no mechanism tying departmental reporting to those definitions [3] [5] | Not fixed |
Credit where due
Four of five is a genuine refresh, not a cosmetic one. The Cabinet Office did not simply delete the dead references; it replaced them with a named service, a working address, and a spending control that was already real policy but had never made it into the document civil servants are told to follow. Two years is a long time for a Playbook to lag behind its own government's rules, but when the Cabinet Office did eventually rewrite it, it rewrote the right things. Nothing in Version 2.0 overstates what has changed: it does not, for instance, claim the halving-spend target has been hit, only that departments were asked to "work towards this" [3], which is consistent with the NAO's own more guarded assessment of progress.
Verdict
Four stars, from one documented mistake. The Cabinet Office fixed the specific, checkable faults this site found in September: a dead office, a dead platform, a dead email address, and an unnamed enforcement gap. What it did not fix is the one the NAO said actually matters for judging whether any of this works: a government that still cannot produce one number for what it spends on consultants, because departments are still free to define "consultancy" however their own annual reports prefer. Writing a longer definition into an annex that nobody is required to use for financial reporting is not the same thing as fixing that.
The star score counts one documented mistake: Version 2.0 repeats the Playbook's existing request for accurate, comparable spend data without addressing the National Audit Office's finding that departmental reporting definitions are inconsistent, a problem the NAO quantified at an average £270 million a year of disagreement between data sources. One mistake falls in the 1-to-3 band: four stars; the bands are on the ratings page. The four mistakes this site documented in September (the dead Hub, the dead Knowledge Exchange, the dead email domain, and the unenforced "comply or explain" line) are counted as fixed, not as mistakes repeated, and are not added to this piece's tally. Analysis is of Version 2.0 of the Consultancy Playbook, the Knowledge and Skills Guidance Note refresh, and Annex 1, all dated November 2026 and live on GOV.UK's publication page as of 7 November 2026. The document is tracked in the Daily Register; a further revision will get its own diff entry.
Sources
- The Cabinet Office guide to hiring consultants tells civil servants to contact a Whitehall unit for help. That unit closed down in January 2023, and the guide has not been rewritten since., Tracked Changes, 12 September 2026
- GOV.UK, "The Consultancy Playbook" publication page (update history: 6 November 2026, "Replaced all documents with updated versions"; checked 7 November 2026). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-consultancy-playbook
- Cabinet Office / Government Commercial Agency, "The Consultancy Playbook", Version 2.0, November 2026 (PDF). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6ae4c8403d3bf10d2354626a/2026-11_-_Consultancy_Playbook_V2.pdf
- Cabinet Office / Government Commercial Agency, "Knowledge and Skills: Generation, Transfer and Sharing", Guidance Note, November 2026 (PDF). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6ae4c84c3d3bf10d2354626b/2026-11_-_Knowledge_and_Skills_Guidance_Note_Refresh.pdf
- Cabinet Office / Government Commercial Agency, "Annex 1: Definitions of Extended Workforce Services", Guidance Note, November 2026 (PDF). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6ae4c8713d3bf10d2354626c/2026-11_-_Annex_1.pdf
- National Audit Office, "Lessons learned: the government's use of external consultants" (full report PDF, 21 November 2025). https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/governments-use-of-external-consultants.pdf
- GOV.UK, "New controls across government to curb consultancy spend and save over £1.2 billion by 2026", press release, 14 November 2024. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-controls-across-government-to-curb-consultancy-spend-and-save-over-12-billion-by-2026
- Government Commercial Agency, "About GCA" (confirms formation 1 April 2026 from Crown Commercial Service and Cabinet Office central commercial teams; checked 7 November 2026). https://www.gca.gov.uk/about-gca