Government rapped over failed IT projects

The UK Government has dismissed allegations that it has squandered £1bn on failed IT projects, but critics say that money will continue to be wasted unless the Government models itself on IT professionals and determines accountability.

A spokesman for the Office of Government Commerce said that allegations made in the media were "not substantiated" and had "no evidence" to back them up. But he admitted that several IT projects had gone wrong and had cost taxpayers money.

He blamed this on a faulty procurement process and pinned his hopes on the introduction of the McCartney review, which aims to evaluate proposed IT projects and ensure that they meet certain criteria. "This will deliver savings to the public, but will take three to four years to come to fruition," he said.

But Liberal Democrat IT spokesman Richard Allan MP said that procurement was only part of the solution, and that "if there was hope, it would lie in the Cabinet Office".

"When things go wrong we ought to see some blood on the carpet," he explained. "The Government needs to develop accountability and it needs a degree of scepticism."

"When a company finds out a project is failing it quickly cuts its losses and runs," he added. "In the public sector people are reluctant to recognise or talk about failures, and money keeps flowing into flawed projects."

Allan said that in large corporations an IT director must defend failing projects to a board of directors and could even lose his job. However, in the public sector IT projects tended to be outsourced and, if anything goes wrong, external consultants get the blame.

An internal document from the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD), given to Network News, confirmed Allan's view.

Kevin Ashley, NDAD project manager, wrote in the paper that the long partnership between ICL and the Inland Revenue caused the latter to lose "all the IT development skills" it needed when the project began showing faults.