Project breakdowns avoidable, says MPs' report

Government ignored lessons spelled out in previous reports, says watchdog

Major government IT project failures over the past decade could have been avoided by learning from past mistakes, according to MPs.

House of Commons watchdog the Public Accounts Committee says significant problems could have been handled better if lessons spelled out by its investigations into past failures had been properly noted.

A committee report published this week, Achieving Value for Money in the Delivery of Public Services, says that a study five years ago revealed it had reported on problems with government IT projects on 25 occasions during the 1990s, setting out a range of good practice.

But subsequent problems such as the Lord Chancellor’s Department’s Libra project, which doubled in cost to £400m, and the National Probation Service’s NSPISS system, reported to cost 70 per cent more than expected at £118m, were ‘not so different’ from previous failures, it says.

The report acknowledges that Whitehall procurement agency the Office of Government Commerce has since taken a number of initiatives to improve project management, such as abandoning the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) for funding IT projects.

‘Many of the inherent problems had, however, been identified by the committee throughout the 1990s and might have been avoided if action had been taken sooner,’ says the report.

A regular feature of many major projects, including those involving IT, has been to incur increased costs or be completed later than planned because of ‘lack of reliable project management’, says the report.

It also urges departments to encourage use of online services and develop realistic egovernment take-up strategies.