Is the UK.gov IT gravy train heading for the buffers?
What Dave could do next...
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
Comment Some of the world’s biggest and best known purveyors of IT services to the UK government could soon be feeling rather sickly, as IT contracts totalling several billion pounds may well be up for review within the next 12 to 18 months. A source of considerable revenue for the likes of EDS, Cap Gemini and PA Consulting – the usual suspects – could be about to dry up overnight.
For we are now entering the twilight zone, that peculiar place that government and civil service decamp to the moment it becomes clear that a change of party and ideology might be on the cards. It happened in 1991 and 1996, when informed opinion expected a change of administration, but not in 2000 or 2004, when it didn’t.
The next election could still be 18 months away, but as of today, bookies have the Tories as clear favourites to be the largest party in the next parliament and to form the next government. Failing that, the smart money is on a hung parliament, with the Lib Dems finally coming in from the cold.
Convention already requires that the Prime Minister authorise senior civil servants to speak to the opposition in advance of a poll, to ensure a smooth transition if they win power at the election. This time, Senior Liberal Democrats will also be invited to hold talks with the heads of Government departments, suggesting that the civil service are taking their prospects seriously.
So what might a change of government mean for some very expensive IT projects? The current ID Cards scheme and National ID database, estimated as likely to cost some £20bn, seem unlikely to survive, given the very public opposition to both by Lib Dems and Tories (and SNP).
Also up for the chop are likely to be the ContactPoint project, which pulls together data on every child in the country in one single central repository and the Central NHS Spine. Both look likely to be replaced under a Conservative administration by a series of more decentralised initiatives, although to date the Lib Dems have been somewhat woollier on what they would do about the NHS scheme.
The Vetting Database, due to go live this year, may prove a little harder to kill. Tory Education Spokeswoman, Maria Miller MP has said that she considers the system to be flawed, in that it will not catch migrant workers who might only be in the UK for a few months. That is, it will identify UK citizens with criminal records, but not foreign citizens who have committed crimes abroad.
The problem with killing this system is that it plays to public fears about child safety. It adds to the CRB checking system, and does away with the cumbersome current requirement for multiple checking. Expect this system to be slimmed down – but not scrapped entirely.
Also unlikely to find favour with an incoming Tory/Lib Dem administration is the £12bn Interception Modernisation Programme, which aims to centralise all electronic communications in a single place.
So, is this bad news for the big IT providers and good news for taxpayers? Not necessarily. We spoke with the Cabinet Office and the Department for Children Schools and Families. Both gave approximately the same answer – which was that contracts would be honoured. A spokeswoman for the DCSF said: "the Department would take into account the rights and responsibilities contained within the contract along with any relevant break clauses and negotiate an appropriate exit."
COMMENTS
sick of this government
- sick of the lying, cheating, self-serving thieves that are in power
- sick of them spending collosal sums of money with their IT chums on shit projects
- sick of their totalitarian removal of civil rights
- sick of their capitulation to hard-lobbying minority/special interest groups
- sick of the unchecked and unmonitored immigration
- sick of the way serious criminals receive laughable sentences
Roll on the next general election. We deserve everything we get if we vote these cretins in again.
@Optymystic
"...there are hierarchies of laws and rules about what is legal, there are constraints on the powers of parliaments, there are structures for challenge to law makers on, natural law, human rights, constitutionality etc."
No, there really aren't. Actually, of course, there's no need to breach contract law - just introduce a 100% windfall tax on revenues from these contracts. But if Government wants to ride roughshod over the law of contract then it can; might have to leave the EU and the WTO to do it; might face sanctions from the rest of the world, but the Crown-in-Parliament is sovereign and can do anything it likes.
Short of a revolution or military invasion from the outside, of course!
Getting back to the point, in practice, what any new goverment should do is to establish a proper in-house IT operation, refuse to do any big projects for ten years and build up the capacity of the in-house IT so that in ten years' time you can deliver on some of these big projects (the ones that aren't a total waste of time) without needing the consultancies.
Large-scale public-sector IT is different in kind from private-sector IT, and the UK government should recognise this and build up a proper in-house operation, since none of the externals can deliver. Of course, this probably means creating an entire Department from scratch, and I wonder if the Civil Service would settle for having a Permanent Secretary who could write code. Imagine having someone who knew what they were talking about! That would never do!
If you want a big IT project that would really help a lot of people, try integrating the tax and benefits systems into a single one where you tell it how much your earning and your other circumstances (married, living together, kids, child-care costs, housing, etc) and it then did a single calculation to either demand taxes or pay out benefits. Would make everyone's lives a hell of a lot easier, by only having to hand over one set of information to one office, rather than ten different sets to ten different sets of people who then adjust how much you get of benefit A depending on how much you were awarded of benefit B, and then the benefit B people cut that because you got benefit A awarded, so the benefit A people put their amount up to compensate and then you have to pay taxes on your benefits, and then benefit B is increased so you can pay your taxes, but that cuts benefit A and this is about the point that you realise you're a character in a Kafka novel.
And another thing...
The job cuts that HP is forcing on EDS are so severe that projects that are underway are becoming impossible to deliver. Apparently the person running HP doesn't care at all what happens to the customer, his bonus just comes from cutting costs.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
