MoD may have misled parliament on defence IT project costs

The Ministry of Defence denied deliberately misleading MPs

A senior Ministry of Defence (MoD) official has admitted that information given in parliament on the cost of a new £7.1bn communications infrastructure could have been misleading.

A National Audit Office report on the Defence Information Infrastructure project in July this year put a £7.1bn price tag on the project, some £4.5bn more than the £2.3bn cost quoted when Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock and Conservative MP Mark Prisk asked about the costs of the project in 2006 in parliament.

It has since emerged that the MoD knew at this point that total costs of the project were likely to be £5.8bn.

When asked by Conservative MP Richard Bacon to explain the discrepancy between the figures during a Public Accounts Committee hearing yesterday, Sir Bill Jeffrey, permanent under-secretary of state in the MoD, denied that the original answer had been deliberately misleading but added:

"What there may have been was an answer that didn't address the question as directly as it might have done."

Jeffrey defended the declaration of the £2.3bn price, saying that the answer given only related to approved costs.

"What we did in response to that question and a number of others is what I think is pretty common practice, which is to give the actual approved figures as approved by the department's investment approval board," he said. "In each case it was explained quite clearly what the figures related to."

Jeffrey said he would write to the committee to clarify the discrepancy.