I used to work at Wonga.
Wonga was a payday lender - the payday lender, for a time the most notorious financial brand in Britain. It pioneered real-time algorithmic lending using 8,000 data points. At its peak: more than a billion pounds in loans annually, over a million customers, a planned one-and-a-half-billion-pound IPO. The APR was 5,853 per cent. It sent fake legal letters to 45,000 customers. It collapsed in 2018, and 358,000 claimants received 4.3 pence in the pound.
I tell people that working in the UK public sector is karmic debt for my time there. It gets a laugh. It is supposed to. But the joke conceals something I have only recently begun to articulate: the arrangement I have stumbled into - contractor to government, accountable by the day, dispensable by design - is not penance at all. It is the most honest working relationship I have ever had. And examining why it works reveals something uncomfortable about the arrangements most people accept without question.
What Wonga Left Behind
Wonga's business model depended on repeat borrowing. More than half of its customers eventually failed to repay. The moralist in me notes that Wonga's disappearance did not solve the problem it exploited. More than a million people in England now borrow from illegal lenders. Buy-now-pay-later has grown to a thirteen-billion-pound market, largely unregulated. The demand did not vanish when the FCA imposed its price cap. It went underground.
This is the first clue to why I love working in the public sector. At Wonga, the problem was how to lend money profitably to people who could not afford to borrow it. In government, the problems are harder. And they are worth solving.
The Vocation That Dare Not Speak Its Name
The Civil Service People Survey tells a story that any structural economist would find illuminating. Eighty-eight per cent of civil servants report being interested in their work. Only twenty-nine per cent are satisfied with their pay. What this reveals is a workforce with extraordinarily high intrinsic motivation and weak organisational attachment - people who stay because the work matters, not because the compensation does.
There are no competitors. There is no quarterly earnings call. There is, instead, a clarity of purpose I have encountered nowhere else: we are building things that citizens depend upon. The joke about karmic debt was originally sincere. But it became untrue within months. I stay not because I owe something. I stay because I have found something.
The Honest Arrangement
But what if the most interesting feature of my working life is not the purpose of the work but the structure of the relationship?
I am a contractor. Not a civil servant, not a permanent employee, not a consultant from one of the large firms that absorb fifty-five per cent of the government's twenty-six-billion-pound digital spend. That fifty-five per cent itself conceals a structural distinction worth making: some of that spend buys genesis-stage work - novel services, digital transformation, capability that does not yet exist - where outside expertise is genuinely necessary. The rest buys commodity-stage work - keeping existing systems running, filling seats, substituting for capability government should have built internally. The first is an investment. The second is a dependency. Government rarely distinguishes between the two, and that failure is where the pathology begins. Any department that cannot name which of its contractors are here to build capability and which are here to fill seats has already lost the distinction that matters. Government procurement teams could start by classifying each contractor engagement as genesis-stage or commodity-stage - different engagements need different contract structures, different durations, and different success criteria.
I work under a statement of work. My accountability is constant - not annual, not quarterly, but defined by deliverables reviewed continuously. If I do not deliver, I am replaced. If I deliver, and there is ongoing demand I may be renewed. There is little ambiguity.
This arrangement, which most people regard as precarious, I regard as liberating. The structural analysis matters more than the personal testimony.
A permanent employee's security comes from tenure. The organisation retains them because replacing them is costly. This creates a mutual dependency - what game theorists call a Nash equilibrium, a stable state in which neither party can improve their position by acting alone. Stable, but not necessarily productive. Employability research shows that tenure-dependent workers, whose market value has atrophied through years of specialisation in one institution's peculiarities, tend towards loyalty and silence even when the organisation is failing. The arrangement purchases institutional insurance - continuity at the cost of candour.
My security comes from employability, not tenure. If I am good at what I do, I do not need this particular contract. This simple fact transforms the power dynamic entirely. What it produces is not merely personal freedom but structural candour - honesty that emerges from the arrangement itself, not from any individual's character.
The Difficult Thing
Here is what structural candour looks like in practice.
Eighteen months into a contract with a government department, I was asked to present a delivery plan to a senior leadership team. The plan they expected me to validate was, structurally, a repetition of the approach that had failed twice before - the same technology, the same supplier dependency, the same timeline assumptions. Every permanent member of the team knew this. I knew they knew because they had told me so, individually, in corridors and coffee queues and Slack messages marked with careful ambiguity. None of them said it in the room.
I said it in the room. I said the plan would fail, that the evidence for this was their own retrospective data, and that continuing to present it as viable was not optimism but institutional dishonesty. The room went quiet in the way that rooms go quiet when someone has said what everybody was thinking but nobody was willing to own.
Why could I say it? Not because I am braver than my permanent colleagues. Several of them are far more courageous than I am. But their courage is taxed by a structural penalty I do not face: they will still be in that building, reporting to those leaders, navigating those relationships, long after the meeting ends. My worst outcome was that I would have my contract terminated. That is a financial inconvenience, not a career catastrophe. The constraints of my arrangement - no tenure, no career ladder, no institutional politics - are what make candour structurally possible rather than merely personally admirable.
I must be honest about what happened next: the plan was revised, but slowly, and not entirely in the direction the evidence suggested. Institutional inertia is powerful. I did not single-handedly save the programme. What I did was make it structurally impossible for the room to pretend that the plan was viable. That is a specific, limited, and real contribution.
The Exit Problem
I must confront the evidence that complicates my own argument. Research into employee responses to dissatisfaction identifies four strategies: Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect. The finding that should trouble anyone making my case is this: highly employable workers are more likely to exit than to use voice. They leave bad situations rather than fighting to improve them.
This is not a minor caveat. It strikes at the heart of my thesis. If employability enables departure rather than challenge, then the arrangement I am praising may produce flight, not fight.
I think the contractor arrangement changes this calculus. A permanent employee who speaks up and fails faces ongoing consequences - damaged relationships, blocked promotions, the slow institutional punishment that organisations administer to dissenters. A contractor who speaks up and fails faces a discrete consequence: non-renewal. There is no long tail of institutional memory. The cost of voice is bounded in a way that permanent employment does not permit. But this is a structural argument about incentives, not proof that most contractors choose challenge over comfort.
This is the survivorship bias I cannot escape. Whether the arrangement works because of the structural features I have identified or because of dispositional traits I brought to it - curiosity, contrarianism, a Wonga-shaped discomfort with convenient silence - is a question I cannot answer from inside my own experience.
The Constitutional Outsider
I am excluded from the Civil Service Code. The Northcote-Trevelyan settlement of 1854 - which created the permanent civil service as a deliberate constitutional design, insulating impartial administrators from political caprice - explicitly does not include me.
This tension is real. Democratic accountability requires institutional memory, and institutional memory requires permanence. A government staffed entirely by contractors would be a government without continuity - without the people who have survived three ministers and four restructures and still remember why the policy was designed the way it was.
But the inverse is equally dangerous. Mariana Mazzucato has argued that the outsourcing cycle itself hollows out institutional capability - that each contractor engagement is a missed opportunity for institutional learning, and that the consulting industry has a structural incentive to perpetuate the dependency it profits from. She is right. The Public Accounts Committee has documented the contractor dependency cycle: departments lose internal skills, hire contractors to fill the gap, fail to rebuild internal capability, and then require more contractors. I would be dishonest if I pretended this dynamic does not exist, or that I do not benefit from it.
When the Model Fails
My freedom depends on a specific precondition: I am employable enough to walk away. My skills have market value. If this contract ends tomorrow, another begins next month. This is not universal.
The model fails - and fails catastrophically - when contractors lack the employability that makes independence genuine. A contractor who cannot find another role is not free. They are a disguised employee with fewer protections: no pension, no sick pay, no redundancy rights. Their rational strategy is to say whatever the client wants to hear. Structural candour becomes structural compliance.
The IR35 reforms of 2017 and 2021 accelerated this pathology. By shifting tax determination from the contractor to the hiring body, and by incentivising blanket inside-IR35 determinations, the reforms drove the most employable contractors out of public sector work entirely. What remained was a selection effect: IR35 selects not for competence but for compliance. The contractor who stays is increasingly the contractor least likely to challenge, because challenging means being noticed, and being noticed means being reassessed. The reform designed to ensure fairness has produced, structurally, a workforce optimised for silence.
The question about pay that I have been avoiding. A public sector IT contractor earns a median of five hundred pounds per day - roughly a hundred and ten thousand pounds a year. A Grade 7 DDaT civil servant earns fifty-eight to sixty-eight thousand. The multiplier is 1.6 to 1.9 times. Would I do this work at civil servant pay? I want to say yes. The honest answer is: I do not know. The purpose is genuine. The pay is also genuine. Pretending the pay is irrelevant would be precisely the kind of convenient dishonesty this piece argues against.
The Question Beneath the Joke
The Bletchley Park pattern recurs throughout British history: bring in outsiders for specific work, give them a defined problem, measure them against results. The Government Digital Service from 2011 to 2015 was built largely by contractors and external hires. The NAO's analysis confirms that the problem is not contractors as such but the management of contractors - and the failure to distinguish genesis-stage investment from commodity-stage dependency. The Service Standard's Point 6 requires sustainable team composition for good reason: all-contractor teams can fail assessment, because sustainability demands institutional roots.
The karmic debt joke persists because it makes my career trajectory legible. It papers over the uncomfortable truth that the arrangement I have found - purpose-driven work, constant accountability, genuine independence, transparent terms, and yes, above-market pay - is not available to most workers in either sector. The permanent civil servant has purpose but often lacks autonomy. The large-firm consultant has autonomy but often lacks purpose. The disguised contractor has neither.
The structural question is not whether my arrangement is good. It is why an arrangement this productive is so rare, and what it would take to make it available to more people without destroying the conditions that make it work. The first step is deceptively simple: every contractor engagement should have an explicit exit criterion - a defined point at which the contractor's knowledge has been transferred, the capability has been built, and the institution no longer needs them. The best contractor relationship is one where the contractor's goal is to make themselves unnecessary. Any contractor who tells you they are indispensable has already become the problem.
I do not owe the public sector a debt. What I owe it - what any of us owe the institutions that serve the public - is honesty about what works, what fails, and why. The joke is retired. What remains is the diagnosis.
(Views in this article are my own.)