From the horse's mouth...
I was involved in another council's Home Access ICT bid in December. If you promise to direct your anger where it belongs, then I'll tell you exactly why your money is being wasted like this. Promise? For Sure? Hope to Die? OK, here we go......
1 - DCSF has hoarded a large pile of unspent £££, and if they don't get it off their balance sheet by 31.03.09 they might lose it next year, or the Tories might score points about why it wasn't spent on something useful (like repairing crumbling schools, or protecting vulnerable children).
2 - The reliable, familiar solution is a spontaneous grant-giving exercise. Dream up some modern-sounding tripe to wrap it in (in this case, remote access via 3G & VPN) and pretend that it's being deployed in a carefully-targeted, strategic project.
3 - Tell each council their provisional allocation, but emphasise it must be spent by 31.03.09. Make sure that they accept their grant by telling the elected councillors about it (God help any official who suggests declining "free money for Urbanville").
4 - The busy council ICT Dept then gets the problem of rolling out 3G VPN laptops to hundreds of unskilled & irresponsible users, within approx 10 weeks. There isn't time to work out an elegant Linux netbook solution with auto-restore functions. They have to spec the standard kit they're used to managing, from their usual corporate suppliers, and lash something up with Windows Steady State.
5 - Everyone involved knows that most of the kit will be lost, stolen, broken, pr0ned or hacked within 3 months, including the councillors and the DCSF. But it's achieved the desired outcome of avoiding embarrassment for the government, so it's a success. If the Audit Commission pokes it's nose in later, we'll just blame ICT for specifying the wrong kit, or the social workers for giving them to the wrong families.
6 - Similar last-minute blessings are showering from every govt dept at this time of year, always have done and always will do. Money is being squandered on poorly-planned, uncoordinated nonsense, while the major infrastructure of public services continues to collapse through underfunding (London Ambulance Service, for example).
And guess what, I like having a job right now so I'm Anon....