Government It Failures - Part II

The Independent is running with an expose of Labour IT failures that show a £26bn overspend / wasted spend over the past decade. so following on from my previous post here’s a few more failed projects



NHS National Programme for IT £12.7bn
Failed to ask medical professionals what the system should be (scoping issues), is years late, has connected only 160 of 9000 health centres. The Legal and commerical support bill has been £39.2m alone.

Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) £7.1bn
Replacement of carying different computer systems in use by Army, Navy, Airforce with one. Was supposed to be used by 300,000 people across 2,000 sites, however it is £180m over budget (quite small compared to the NHS programme) and 18 months late.

National Identity Scheme £5bn
The much discussed national ID card scheme, originally budgeted at £3bn and now effectively cancelled. Many, many issues with biometric features of it failing to properly recognise people.

Single Payment Scheme System £350m
A new sophisticated way of paying farmers subsidies based on their land area. In 2006 it’s failure meant that £1.28bn of £1.5bn of subsidies had not been paid. Although it’s cost £350m the Public Accounts committe warned last year that it was already at risk of |becomign obselete”

GCHQ server move, £300m
When GCHQ decided to move their server systems to a new building it was proejcted to cost £41m, in teh end it cost more than £300m.

Department for Transport Shared Services Centre £81m
A panacea that would integrate human resources and financial services together across the department and all of its agencies. It was even supposed to save the tax payer £57m. The total project will now cost more money (nearly twice more) than it was supposed to save and has meant that staff at the DVLA have had to learn german as the software installed is unable to use English for some messages

This isn’t the complete Independent list but just a few of my favourites (in particular I’m a big fan of GCHQ’s server move). I do think this list illustrates my point in my last post though that IT is fast becoming the defence procurement of this century with poorly scoped projects and ridiculous over spends.

Related Content