Thursday, January 28, 2010

Government has wasted £1.2bn on failed IT projects – Willott

Following the announcement of the Government’s new ICT Strategy, Liberal Democrat Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, Jenny Willott released figures showing that 33 abandoned and 77 over budget Government ICT projects over the last decade have wasted almost £1.2bn in taxpayers’ money and caused a total of 70 years worth of delays.

Commenting, Cardiff Central MP Jenny Willott said:

“The Government has a track record of eye-wateringly expensive IT cock ups that have cost taxpayers billions.

“Labour’s addiction to grandiose computer projects has poured billions of taxpayers’ money down the drain and causedhuge delays.

“The Government has proved itself staggeringly incompetent at keeping information safe. So many CDs, laptops and data sticks go missing that the idea that Labour can be trusted to store huge amounts of personal information is laughable.

“It’s about time this mess was sorted out, but it remains to be seen whether ministers can deliver this strategy on time and to budget.”


2 comments:

Frank Little said...

On the face of it (I haven't had the chance to look at it in detail) the Strategy has some good things in it: open source, open standards and re-use.

Where the government falls down is in management. There are not enough civil servants at the higher managerial levels with ITC knowledge, and very few politicians with experience of managing any project, never mind large IT.

Thatcher and Heseltine believed that you could separate out policy from design & build, and set about privatising the latter. They broke down the professional IT structures, which the Callaghan administration had built up, in the process. The policy failed. It is not clear that Labour has addressed this particular problem.

Anonymous said...

Drop in the Ocean (finance) how much did the government waste in failed banks?