Interesting how little pentest rates have moved on in the UK in the last 20 years. I was a customer of big UK testing companies back then and rates were around that already, so there's been effectively no increase there in that timeframe, if you're still getting work at the £750-£1000 range.
Yep, more competition, more knowledge and more efficiency is meaning that you can't really push big prices unless you're either going for a massive company (I've seen my day rate as high as 1800 before for doing relatively generic work for gov organizations). When I first started contracting we were replacing a big-4 consulting firm charging 3200/day for some stuff (!) For a UK insurance comoany. Alternatively as I mentioned if you're doing specialist work (code review, hardware, some forms of SE, mainframe testing) you can definitely push the numbers up depending on the client. I have friends still working at several of the larger companies and the day rates really around about 8-900/day on average but they just supplement it by tacking an extra day on whenever they can. All depends on the customer and the sales guy tbh.
On average I'd even say that my day rate went down compared with 10 odd years ago - when you needed an interview at GCHQ to get CHECK - as there were just few people doing it whereas there are loads now.
