Lucy Phillips | 28 July 2011
The government’s approach to IT has been ‘a recipe for rip-offs’, a group of senior MPs have concluded.
A report by the Public Administration Select Committee, published today, gave a damning verdict on successive Whitehall IT strategies. An over-reliance on large contractors and lack of in-house skills has resulted in late, over-budget IT systems that are not fit for purpose, says the report Government and IT – “a recipe for rip-offs”: time for a new approach.
PASC chair and Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin said witnesses to their inquiry had given ‘truly worrying accounts about the amount of money successive governments have wasted on failed IT projects’.
He continued: ‘According to some sources the government pays between seven and ten times more than the standard commercial rate for its work: however the government does not collect the information needed to verify these claims.’
The report argues that Whitehall must break out of its procurement relationships with a small number of large companies. Improving the information it collects on IT spending, publishing more information on IT projects and simplifying the procurement process to help engage SMEs would all help with this, the MPs say.
Jenkin said: ‘The government has said that it is overly reliant on an “oligopoly” of suppliers; some witnesses went further and described the situation as a ‘cartel.’ Whatever we call the situation it has led to an inexcusable situation that sees governments waste an obscene amount of public money.’
The committee welcomed the coalition’s overhaul of IT procurement, with Jenkin adding: ‘We will need to wait and see whether it can make progress in an area that has resisted so many previous attempts at reform.’
