Capgemini wins £107M HMRC extension – no competition needed UK tax collector His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has awarded Capgemini a £107 million support and services deal, without competition, under a relationship that started more than twenty years ago. The French outsourcer is being rehired to provide business application support and maintenance services for a set of " …
HMRC have taken many of the staff outsourced under Aspire and the subsequent contracts back in-house ( or as near as makes no difference), but have left enough in the hands of CapGemini to still be over a barrel.
Fujitsu still have ownership of the VME platform on which some of their systems still run, which will remain the case until they are replaced or migrated. How long until they wriggle free of CapGemini's grasp?
Speaking as one of those people they insourced HMRC didn't take that many staff in-house (to RCDTS, a GovCo), excluding the helpdesk it was less than 10% and the helpdesk staff were later outsourced again to Fujitsu. The networks staff they brough in-house were eventually outsourced to BT, at least the very few that remained at that point.
When they closed RCDTS in Feb 23 and moved the remaining staff to civil service proper there was a lot of attrition (myself included) because technical people didn't want to be part of the shambles that is CDIO. Quite a few went back to Capgemini at that point.
There doesn't seem much incentive for HMRC to move legacy systems away from incumbent suppliers who have all the knowledge. What they need to do is to finally get on with transforming their estate and getting off these legacy platforms. They've had plenty of time and taxpayers money to have done this by now
If a small British business served one client for 18 years, HMRC would call it suspicious. “Too cosy,” they’d mutter. “Must be gaming the system.” But when Capgemini does it, it’s “instrumental in delivering vital public services.”
Small businesses are told to fight for crumbs through endless procurement hoops. But the big consultancies? They get handed blank cheques and described as “trusted partners.” They’re not vendors - they’re institutions now, beyond scrutiny, baked into the machinery of government failure.
And of course, the final farce: the public sector proudly announcing its bold new vision to “move away from legacy systems”… by signing more secretive deals with the exact same old suppliers, plus a few handshakes with Google and OpenAI to add some Silicon Valley fairy dust.
Welcome to Britain: where small firms get compliance checks, and monopolists get multi-year renewals.
Cap Gemini average UK salary is £50k. Assume 30% for full cost loading, so £65k. £107m divided by £65k is 1,646 FTE years. Per year that's 823 people working full time to support this legacy.
Does a team of over 800 people sound likely, or is it the usual story that government are splurging vast sums to big companies for next to nothing in return?
When I worked for a large corporation providing services to a government department the rate at which I was being charged to the taxpayer was never less than 4 times my pay rate. Even allowing for the usual overheads (superannuation etc.) that still left a healthy profit margin for my employer.
The person needs a device to work from so need to add in the provision, management and maintenance of X laptops that will likely be rented
The person needs somewhere to sit so add in the cost of a building, energy, building security, tea at the tea point (what do you mean there is no free tea? This is Great Britain)
There's insurance - cyber if nothing else
Any licensed software in there? In which case that will be passed on, hopefully without markup
etc
> Accepted, but does anyone believe there's 300 people working full time on maintain and support work?
That's probably about right.
In 2020 (can't find any newer figures) there were ~550 systems hosted on 7,000 servers in legacy data centres i.e. the ones covered by this contract. So does 300 staff for 550 systems seem high/low/reasonable to you? (https://www.thestack.technology/hmrcs-cdio-under-pressure-to-innovate-and-find-more-savings-2/)
By comparison, HMRC on its own has 4,000 IT staff. (https://www.techmonitor.ai/digital-economy/government-computing/hmrc-digital-workforce-transformation-cdio?cf-view)
What about the average salary in India? My company (name like a large gun) outsourced areas to Crap Gemini, and it seems that their workforce is largely based in India. They're supposed to be supporting legacy systems, but their general IT knowledge is dreadful, and their staff changes every few months.
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