Thegovernment has wasted at least half a billion pounds on
overrun IT projects, according to figures
collected by Liberal Democrat shadow chancellor Vince
Cable.
The Twickenham MP described the overruns as the "biggest waste
of money in government", and warned that the total losses may be
much higher.
Cable has collected the figures by asking each department
annually for five years how much each of their IT projects has
overrun since it began.
IT projects at the
Department for Work and Pensions are running a total of 21
years late and are £315m overbudget. One project the Pensions
Transformation Project, aims to improve customer service and
efficiency. It is running £169m overbudget.
The Department for Transport's shared services programme will
cost £92m - triple the £31m originally planned.
The telecommunications network at the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office will cost £240m, compared with an original estimate of
£180m.
The total figure does not include any information from two of
the biggest departments, the Home Office and the Department of
Health. The NHS Programme for IT is now costing tax payers £12.4bn.
Cable said the departments had either not answered at all, or had
called the information requested "commercially sensitive".
Cable is working on this year's total figure for government IT
overspend. He has been prevented from finding out the true scale of
the losses because of departments' refusal to answer all his
questions.
"It is fundamentally undemocratic, and very unsatisfactory. We
suspect that the worst is being hidden to protect the government
from embarrassment," he said.