Government IT spend "somewhere between £13bn and £21bn"

Treasury troubleshooter says fragmented public sector spending is almost impossible to measure accurately

Whitehall could make "significant savings" in IT

Total government spending on IT could be anywhere between £13bn and £21bn, but the fragmented nature of the public sector makes it almost impossible to tell, according to a government troubleshooter brought in to slash costs.

Martin Read, former chief executive of Logica, was brought into the Treasury last summer to try and improve back-office and IT efficiencies in the public sector, and is due to announce his review intentions alongside this year's budget.

Speaking at the Government IT '09 conference in London yesterday, Read told delegates that measuring expenditure in the public sector, particularly local government, was very hard to do.

"Little detail is kept on what is getting spent and what it is getting spent on," he said. "The public sector is big and very fragmented."

Read and his team used five different methods to evaluate public sector IT spend, and came up with results as low as £13bn and as high as £21bn, finally settling on an average figure of about £16bn in 2007/08, though he admits this is a "very inexact science".

Read said that his team had used six different methods to evaluate the extent to which spend could be reduced, and they all came up with about the same figure – although he cannot reveal it until the budget is announced in March.

"All six methods of evaluation concur on the same amount – and it's a significant amount," he said.