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Gov IT procurement talks enter third year

Meeting next week to thrash out contracts

Yet, Bickerstaff said, they had become standard fare in public sector contracting, and it was common for even more stringent contractual terms to be introduced.

This approach to contracting might be likened to ideas popular in the Spanish Inquisition and the CIA that better confessions are extracted out of people when they are put in thumb screws.

"Law firms are using this as a starting point and then just lobbing in tougher stuff," said Bickerstaff. But this was an "inappropriate overhead" that suppliers compensated for with higher prices and didn't "lead to any likelihood of project success," he said.

Bickerstaff said he routinely struck certain of the more onerous terms out of the contracts he drew up, even when he represented the public sector.

This included the financial distress clause, which demand that if a company is in financial distress its payments are siphoned off, just when it needed them the most, into a reprocurement fund.

He also struck out trigger termination rights, which had caused suppliers to raise their prices to compensate for the additional risk on their investments in large IT projects.

Bickerstaff had become concerned that public sector procurers where being told to "comply or explain" with the contested terms when they were evaluated as part of the OGC's Gateway Review process, which is supposed to monitor large IT projects and prevent them from going off the rails. But the reviews are conducted in secret.

Pat Barlow, government sales chief for BT Global Services and chair of the Intellect working group due to meet the OGC on 11 December, admitted there was a meeting due, but refused to say any more without Intellect's permission.

Nick Kalisperas, Intellect's government liaison, said it was in "sensitive discussions"that he was not prepared to talk about.

Industry is criticised for making more profit on public sector than on private contracts. Yet industry representative Intellect has been in the privileged position to discuss secretly with the government the means by which its members spend billions of pounds of public money.

Clearly, after two years of failure to reach an agreement, and with the National Audit Office having said that a lack of transparency was one of the causes of difficulty for the National Programme for IT, it is time for both government and industry to come clean on how they are spending this money.®

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