Naivety led to GCHQ IT crisis

Moving the headquarters of the GCHQ government communication centre cost more than seven times the original estimates because no one had understood the complexity of IT operations, MPs were told this week.

But the Commons Public Accounts Committee was also told that the cock-up had actually delivered "lasting value" - by forcing a major network upgrade.

GCHQ director David Pepper admitted that when plans were drawn up in the 1990s to move to a £1.2bn headquarters in Cheltenham, it was not understood how much networking there would be between computer systems.

The National Audit Office said the miscalculation meant the cost of the move had risen from an original estimate of £41m to £308m.

Dr Pepper said the plans to transfer the computers had been based on the systems used during the Cold War, when the GCHQ had to deal with a relatively static threat from the Soviet Union involving little interaction between different systems.

But the growing complexity of the threats facing the UK in the 1990s meant there had been an increase in networking between computer systems.

The engineers simply didn't understand the complexity of the IT transition, he said.

Sir David Omand, the Cabinet Office intelligence and security co-ordinator who was GCHQ director from 1996 to 1997, said: "I cannot excuse the failure to recognise these issues earlier. I take responsibility," he said.

He also noted that the end result had been that GCHQ now had a much improved computer system with a new information technology architecture.

If the system had not been upgraded as a result of the move, they would have been left with a "decaying" system that would now be in urgent need of an emergency update.

"The large expenditure which was authorised on the technical transition has produced lasting value in terms of the new architecture, the ability to manage it and considerably more resilience," said Omand.

"It is a very large sum of money but it does represent real value."

An Office of Government Commerce spokesman said the Gateway Review process should prevent a repeat of the disaster.