Government procurement could *start* with some actual *penalty* clauses
The US government has a right to walk away from any contract without compensation.
This fact alone is a major reason for the structure of US companies that are almost exclusively "Govt con-tractors"
Curious that HMG, despite it's fondness for emulating US methods, has not adopted a similar policy, is it not?
It's not like there aren't enough lawyers in parliament.
They may (will?) not understand the technology involved but they can understand the idea of wheather it does (or does not) meet the requirements
And BTW there's a classic old story from "Programming Pearls" that describes a Bell Labs exercise to build an email system for an Olympics. The lead research did a quite BOTE calc and concluded the bid proposal they were going to put in (as written) would need something like an 80sec minute to work out.
I wonder how many of those "unforeseen technical complexities that are "too fundamental" for any change control process to deal with" were of those kind.
We'll probably never know because the government will claim "Commerical confidentiality,"
Which means that the con-sultants can "find" exactly the same problem again next time.
HMG giving money to con-sultants and con-tractors is like sleeping with a dog you adopted that morning from a pound that's been living on the streets for a year and not expecting to wake up scratching yourself.