BenchBee: UK tech sector loses GBP £3bn to idle IT experts yearly
New analysis from BenchBee indicates a significant inefficiency in the UK tech sector, with over GBP £3.06 billion in IT talent sitting idle on consultancy benches annually, despite 81% of UK businesses reporting critical skills shortages. The analysis highlights the paradox in which major consultancies both shed and struggle to replace skilled professionals.
Idle expertise
According to BenchBee's findings, UK consultancies routinely pay consultants who are fully employed but not deployed between projects. This bench time accumulates across the industry to a cost exceeding GBP £3 billion each year. The research shows a typical mid-sized consultancy loses GBP £15.3 million per year due to this inefficiency.
The analysis also projects that by 2030, the digital skills gap could remove GBP £27.6 billion of value from the UK economy. The shortage, it argues, is not of talent itself, but of effective talent utilisation across organisations.
Wider sector challenges
The UK consultancy sector is experiencing several pressures including lower business investment growth, a deceleration in GDP, and widespread layoffs. Investment growth is expected to slow to 1.6% in 2025, compared to 4.8% previously. The summer saw particularly slow economic output, prompting even the largest consultancies to scale back operations.
Layoffs in the UK tech sector have affected more than 180,000 workers in 2025 alone, with at least 50,000 redundancies linked to AI implementation. The workforce change creates an environment where specialists with exactly the skills in demand are being released from roles, while other businesses report difficulty in sourcing those same skills.
"The biggest challenge today isn't a lack of talent; it's a lack of visibility and access to the talent," said Hassen Hattab, Founder and CEO, BenchBee.
The hire-or-fire cycle
BenchBee's analysis describes a long-standing dilemma for consultancies. Permanent employees offer consistency and cultural fit but incur high fixed costs, while freelancers present flexibility but can lack accountability and standardisation. The result, the company argues, has been a repeating cycle of periods of over-hiring followed by mass layoffs, contributing to inefficiency and low morale.
Efforts to build a more flexible workforce have introduced problems around quality and trust. Many organisations still find themselves paying for employees who are unassigned to live projects, while others are unable to recruit the capacity required to deliver on urgent contracts.
"We're both shedding talent and struggling to find it. The system is broken, but it doesn't have to be. There's a crucial piece of the puzzle being overlooked, the talent we already have but fail to fully utilise," said Hattab.
Talent sharing model
The emergence of talent-sharing platforms is providing a response. By enabling consultancies to make unused specialists available across a vetted network, businesses can access needed expertise for short or long-term needs. Companies are able to reduce the costs of maintaining a surplus workforce, while others can meet skill gaps almost instantly, without resorting to traditional recruitment or contract freelancers.
The approach allows companies to monetise bench time, improve workforce flexibility, and support delivery of projects with the skills available in the market. BenchBee reports that consultancies adopting this collaborative capacity model are already measuring increases in team productivity and long-term resilience.
Hattab said, "We don't have a skills shortage in the UK, we're just not sharing talent."
"This isn't about replacing permanent staff or competing with freelancers. It's about giving organisations a reliable, flexible, and accessible workforce. Collaboration, not competition, is how companies will close the skills gap and rebuild flexibility for the future," said Hattab.
