Re: Controversial Aspire Contract
Mainly that it was bloody massive and went on forever. It was a £10Bn, 13+ year contract for an exclusive set of suppliers. That was shaky ground for procurement practices even then and by today's standards of G-cloud and standardised call offs and purchasing frameworks looks like lunacy in terms of the amount of risk it concentrated onto two or three main suppliers.
However (and whisper this quietly) it is probably one of the most effective and cost-effective IT procurement and operations programs in the history of government. As a good contrast, it is a contemporary of and similar in size to the NPfIT that all-but destroyed the NHS's technology landscape for two decades.
That's why Cap and to a lesser extent Fujitsu keep picking up work even though Aspire itself is long-since over - HMRC don't really want to give it to anyone else. Things are mostly working well and between austerity, brexit and covid there hasn't been any budget to do anything other than steady-state for nearly ten years.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
