241 Pizza

More bills were paid by the Government last year when QinetiQ, which provided the National Policing Improvement Agency with a system called the Police Portal, sued the agency for £6.6 million after the project was cancelled. QinetiQ’s lawyers said that the agency had “failed to provide consistent and timely data” and was “routinely failing to return telephone calls, or answer e-mails and correspondence.” The claim was settled out of court and beyond the gaze of the public eye.

An analysis by The Times of the main government IT contracts reveals a succession of problems, delays and overruns.

Almost 5 per cent of IT projects have been given two consecutive “red flags” by independent experts employed by the Office of Government Commerce. It said that these 45 projects had consistently “unachievable” aims but it would not reveal which contracts were in trouble.

Next month officials at the Ministry of Justice expect to receive a scathing report from the National Audit Office after a multimillion-pound prison project almost tripled in cost.

The audit office is expected to question why the cost of the National Offender Management Information System shot up from £234 million in June 2004 to £690 million by August 2007 at the same time as its scope was scaled back.

The project, to link up records for each offender across the criminal justice system, is now being installed only in prisons and not shared with the Probation Service, as originally planned.

There are many successes in government IT, including the efficient online system used by thousands to renew their car tax, but they are overshadowed by the many calamities. Among their number are delays in marking school SAT tests, delays of four years in the Scope system to combat terrorism by linking intelligence services and the failed online Medical Training Application Service, which has angered junior doctors.

Progress in a multibillion-pound project to replace more than 300 systems used by the Armed Forces, the Defence Information Infrastructure, has also been slow. In its first three years the MoD spent more than 90 per cent of its original budgeted costs but received less than half of the computer equipment and software that it expected.

Last month the Public Accounts Committee criticised the programme’s “severe underperformance” and said that MoD officials had made “major miscalculations” about the buildings in which the new system would be installed.

In 1998 Fujitsu bid £146 million to provide IT for the magistrates’ courts, in a project known as Libra. It ended up being paid £232 million for only part of the original system. The whole project is now expected to cost in excess of £500 million, a 352 per cent cost overrun.

The cost of computing

£18.6bn overspend on key IT contracts

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