What stops Whitehall from going to court in any major IT
dispute?
Fujitsu and the Department of Health have been locked in a
protracted dispute since lawyers for the Department of Health
served a termination notice on Fujitsu in May last year.
Fujitsu is said to be seeking £700m from the Department of
Health after the department
ended its £1bn contract as the local service provider on the
NPfIT for the south of England.
The two sides are likely to have been through the pre-litigation
stages in the contract, such as arbitration, leaving litigation as
the next logical step.
But the case is unlikely to ever be heard in court.
The Department of Health is defensive and secretive at the best
of times - a point made to the House of Lords Communications
committee when it
held an inquiry into the Government's relationships with the
media.
The department and Connecting for Health (CfH) are particularly
secretive and defensive over the National Programme for IT. They
haven't published any of their own reviews into the scheme, though
they did, to give them credit, publish 31 Gateway reviews on the
programme.
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and former health ministers who include
Lord Hutton, Lord Warner,
Caroline Flint and Ben Bradshaw have vigorously defended the
NPfIT in Parliament, in public statements, or at press
conferences.
NPfIT officials and ministers will not therefore welcome a court
hearing in which claims and counter claims about the UK
government's largest IT investment are aired in public in the run
up to a General Election.
A settlement may come shortly before next year's General
Election, and be kept quiet. The Tories, if they win, may reveal
the amount because they would have nothing to lose by the
publicity.
All of which leaves Fujitsu holding all the legal aces. The same
goes for any other IT suppliers that find themselves in dispute
with central departments.
It's a pity that mandarinate has so much to hide from the IT
industry, the public, Parliament, and the media that its unofficial
motto on legal disputes is: "Sue us and we won't see you in
court".
The Govt vs EDF
History shows that the Government is willing to start litigation
against IT suppliers but isn't prepared to let the cases go to an
open court hearing which leads to a judgment.
In April 2002 a High Court hearing which had lasted 44 days
ended suddenly when airlines running the loss-making National Air
Traffic Services (Nats) agreed to pay millions of pounds to
computer services supplier EDS.
The settlement came on the day the most high-profile witness in
the case, Civil Aviation Authority chairman
Sir Roy McNulty, was due to take the witness stand. He was
expected to be asked about evidence he gave to the Commons
transport committee when he was chairman of Nats.
A senior lawyer, who has decades of experience of IT litigation,
says he is unaware of any central government department taking a
major IT dispute to trial and judgment.