UK.gov is doing sod all to break £20bn of locked-in IT contracts

If IT wasn't perceived to be such a boring topic by Joe Public, the amount the government still spends on expensive clunky technology would be viewed as a national scandal. Across the entire public sector the annual figure has been pegged at around £20bn. No one knows for sure. As long as Whitehall's money is locked into …

[lightman]

UK.gov is doing sod all

You're right - they are doing sod all ............ about anything !!!!

[hplasm]

Re: UK.gov is doing sod all

Not completely- remember every pocket has a silver lining...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: UK.gov is doing sod all

Has any government ever done anything ... apart from spend our tax money without thought?

[Hollerithevo]

Re: UK.gov is doing sod all

Any government ever done anything: well, they run the NHS, ensure roads are built and maintained, pay for schools, build and maintain bridges, support and/or regulate sewage, water, electricity, energy, set standards for food safety, supply police, fire service, armed forces, ensure people are fed and housed when they have no work, put criminals in gaol, a few things like that.

Governments are how the people in a country organise services for the common good of us all. They get above themselves and think they are masters rather than servants, but the principle of centralised services is quite a good one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Costs a lot but employs a lot

The cost of IT services in the UK may be very high but it also employs a great number of people in the UK.

So the UK government will receive a large chunk of that money back in the form of income tax and money spent in the economy.

Also headline figure of £20B may seem very high, but with a population of over 65 million that equates to approx £300 per person per year in IT costs.

I agree things could be done possible cheaper and better but which company would take on say the NHS or the MoD contracts, not many companies that could do it all.

[Bogle]

Re: Costs a lot but employs a lot

Rather missing the point that we don't *want* a single supplier to do it all as we've seen where that leads us with failed projects and huge overruns.

Please don't divide the costs over the whole population. The total of UK Income Tax payers is a little over 30 million according the Gov's National Statistics (which would, amusingly, be about £666 per taxpayer).

As for seeing the money being spent going back into circulation it really doesn't account for the vast profits being siphoned out by these huge firms.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Costs a lot but employs a lot

"Rather missing the point that we don't *want* a single supplier to do it all as we've seen where that leads us with failed projects and huge overruns."

I'm sure you can point to the evidence that splitting the contract up into multiple smaller contracts with the government acting as systems integrator is more effective?

[John G Imrie]

Re: Costs a lot but employs a lot

The cost of IT services in the UK may be very high but it also employs a great number of people in the UK India.

FTFY

[BebopWeBop]

Re: Costs a lot but employs a lot

Sure you have the correct icon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Costs a lot but employs a lot

Not UK Public sector it does not, a large chunk of the work is done in the UK e.g MOD and MOJ

[Doctor Syntax]

Maybe the Cabinet Office and/or NAO should pick the worst offenders out to be put into special measures and send in a team to sort them out with the others - and their ministers - being put on notice that this would be a rolling programme.

If one or two ministers were then asked in Parliament why their departments were having this treatment I think we could be sure that there'd be much clearer answers next year.

[Whitter]

Commercial confidentiality in the public domain

Exclusions for commercial confidentiality on a public contract simply has to end. Too many cosy deals with public employees coming from / going to the external companies in question.

If you want to do public work, then expect the public to see what you are up to.

Long-term this should help other companies effectively compete and force the public sector selection process be explained fully and clearly (we picked the third most expensive options as they were the first bid capable of delivering their proposal - here's our working).

[John G Imrie]

Re: Commercial confidentiality in the public domain

Id give a little leeway here in that failed bids did not have to be published, but the names of the companies / consortia did. This gives a slightly stronger hand to those organisations the next time the contract comes up for renewal countering the let's stick with the incumbent bias.

[Whitter]

Re: Commercial confidentiality in the public domain

My initial instinct would be to agree: but it is likely that in order to demonstrate a solid selection process, the public need to see what was not selected to ensure a clearly better bid was not overlooked. Potentially this could be voluntary on the side of the failed bidder(s) as, if their bid was fair / better, then allowing the publication of that bid could be an effective tool in forcing the selection to be more honest in future - potentially even allowing for an appeal process.

[John G Imrie]

Re: Commercial confidentiality in the public domain

I have nothing against a failed bid being published at the behest of the bidder, I just thought that forcing it might deter people from bidding if they had to reveal their bid without the benefit of winning the contract.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are neoliberals, they represent capital not tax payers. Why would they want to save tax payers money ? Remember private finance initiative - £57 billion of assets for which the tax payer got charged £300 billion! Both New Labour and the Tories thought this was a wonderful idea. It was for off shore tax dodging billionaires - but not the rest of us.

[adam payne]

The Ministry of Justice named Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services, Sopra Steria, Atos and CGI as its main suppliers, with all of those deals set to run out this year. The CGI contract was first signed in 2006 and was extended for three years.

Incredibly, the department could not say what the total contract value of those deals will be because “it does not hold the information.” Neither could it say what its exit strategy is for not signing new contracts worth more than £100m.

How can you not know how much something will cost? did they not think about this when signing the contract.

It doesn't hold the information, well who does then?

[Bigg Phill]

Is it really ludicrously high?

"Across the entire public sector the annual figure has been pegged at around £20bn. No one knows for sure.

As long as Whitehall's money is locked into costly long-term tech contracts, there's little hope of dramatically cutting its ludicrously high IT spend."

According to Wikipedia, the total government spend last year was £772bn

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_Kingdom)

That puts the IT spend at 2.6% of total budget

According to this article, the average for businesses is 3.5%

(http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hardware/articles/123617.aspx)

By all means criticise the crony capitalism / corporatism that favours the big players and the lack of both clarity and transparency but the overall spend doesn't seem that big to me.

Although that doesn't mean it can't come down.

[John G Imrie]

Re: Is it really ludicrously high?

Those figures are skewed by social protection and health. Two things that don't have to be provided for by a company. Take them out and re do the figures.

[rd232]

Re: Is it really ludicrously high?

"Those figures are skewed by social protection and health. Two things that don't have to be provided for by a company. Take them out and re do the figures."

Oh well, if a private company doesn't need to do it, clearly it doesn't need any IT to run it when government does it... You'd be on stronger ground taking your first point in a "the comparison doesn't make much sense" direction.

[All names Taken]

Tsk! Silly-billies?

Perhaps we have it all wrong?

I mean - most posts start with the premise that the guvmint and Charlie Whitehall are there to provide public service usually based on public tax quids. But that premise might be inaccurate?

Try this premise: public exists to serve guvmint and Charlie Whitehall.

See - it all makes sense now.

Public dosh to do guvmint n Charlie Whitehall whims?

Public blood to be spilt in some far away lands over the horizon?

And to be fair to some of Whitehall's Departments perhaps they really, really don't have a clue because Charlie Whitehall has made decisions for them and all they have to do is cough up required amount out of their departmentals budgets?

Hmm-hmm? Just wonderin thats all ...

[AlanT1]

Damn near impossible to sort

Once the free market cat was let out of the bag to hunt in the public sector the public skill set to run projects as given here became rather difficult to maintain. It will be an interesting study, if anyone was to be allowed to undertake it, to see just how the new HMRC project and publicly owned private company (I think) cope with dealing with the scale of operation done by Capgemini Aspire. We continue to see contracts with no plan for exit, no concept of knowledge retention and escalating costs. Tough times continue.

[ArthurKinnell]

No Microshaft?

Not sure how MS doesn't appear in top spends, or are we to presume all gov departments run opensource software?

[Ozymandias]

Re: No Microshaft?

No they spend plenty on M$ but they're mainly indirect contracts held by resellers, not direct with Microsoft. Which reminds me of the time we pointed out to a large UK government department that they were licensed for 5 million users of a popular unified communications product, despite having about 40 times less IT users. They weren't especially interested, which I think illustrates the major barrier to transparency in public sector IT spending - the CBE-jeopardising embarrassment it could cause to the good public servants that signed off the deals in the first place.

[Blotto]

great comments

Great to see so many common sense comments against the common grain of the perception that you can buy stuff cheap from scan and throw it at organisations and it'll somehow be useful and work.

There's good and bad all round.

The biggest problem is that the civil service, from ~ 2000, was hell bent on out sourcing its IT functions. They naively assumed they where not IT shops and the private sector would be much better at IT. The problem is those departments had/have unique IT requirements best served by their own people who understand their organisations needs instead of the generic best practices the outsourcers sell to management & execs. It must be seen in the context of the bespoke systems many built and operated who's operators where ageing and bespoke ageing equipment becoming expensive to keep operating with a backdrop of a general push in the industry to move to generic wintel systems. This was post the uk's 'Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency' loosing its influence and dwindling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Computer_and_Telecommunications_Agency

IT was and is standards based, it must be clearly defined and implemented in life cycle models. The legacy of CCTA are things like ITIL, PRINCE, SSADM, useful tools to build long lasting life cycle systems built with an eye to the systems future replacement without vendor lock-in. Government must take back control if its IT. Dishing services out to lots of small integrators is a huge recipe for disaster. The departments will now have to understand its own IT requirements (the incumbent integrators currently own this knowledge), clearly define them and then manage an integrator and then also manage the integrators integration with the other integrators. How many staff will they now need to manage all these contracts, what skills will they need, as managers they will also command a huge salary. They may as well just bring the whole lot in house, reduce the complexity & expense of management whilst ensuring they have fewer cracks for integrators to hide their failings in.

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone checked how the DWP/CHS migration is progressing ? Or not.