The UK's political leaders Gordon Brown,David Cameronand Nick Clegg have said
they want to cut public sector spending - but how many of the
government's big IT projects, which Computer Weekly lists today,
can really be cut?
London's mayor Boris Johnson referred,
in a column in the Daily Telegraph this week, to a cascade of
bad law from Whitehall and Brussels which has created "non-jobs" in
IT and elsewhere where people are "happily filling their days in
meetings and PowerPoint presentations".
But though the public government spends about £14bn a year on
IT, much of it is contractually committed, the biggest IT projects
having been contracted out.
Billions are being spent on projects and programmes to modernise
departments that provide front-line services: HM Revenue and
Customs and the Department of Work and Pensions keep electronic
accounts on almost everyone living in the UK.
The DWP, which has one of the largest IT estates in Europe, has
£2.4bn worth of IT-enabled change programmes. They include a £178m
project to provide a
Central Payments System to make the department less dependent
on potentially unreliable legacy systems and cut fraud. It is the
DWP's third attempt at introducing a central payments system.
A separate DWP project, the £598m
Pensions Transformation Programme, is aimed at simplifying
pension payments and processes, and cutting time spent on training
staff. It should also mean that pensioners who claim more than one
benefit can give their details once only.
The Department also has plans to hold a series of competitions -
worth potentially billions of pounds - to replace service contracts
held by EDS and BT and which are due to expire in 2010 and 2011.
These include the support and replacement of up to 140,000 desktop
systems.
HM Revenue and Customs has embarked on an
"MPPC" (Modernising PAYE Processes for Customers) project -
which it has been planning for several years - to bring together
scattered information on more than 25 million PAYE employees. The
programme should help ensure that employees are paying the right
amount of tax.
Separately HMRC is working on a
Tax Credits Transformation Programme to cut mistakes and
particularly to reduce under and over-payments.
The Ministry of Defence has a project, the
Defence Information Infrastructure, which is worth up to £7bn,
to install standardised Windows-based secure systems within the
three armed services.
Most of the £7bn has not yet been spent. But if successful, the
project could save more than it costs because it would replace
about 300 costly legacy systems and software.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office
"Future Firecrest" project to support a next-generation desktop
and support service is due for completion by February 2012 and has
a budget of £401m.
It is being designed to help provide more mobile, rapid-response
systems, and video-conferencing so that global teams can work
together regardless of location.
These are the pick of the government's biggest or
"mission-critical" IT-enabled projects and programmes:
1) Cabinet Office - SCOPE Programme - sharing intelligence
information across 10 Departments. The main beneficiary is the
Foreign and Commonwealth office. Phase 2 has been shelved. It was
to extend the reach of SCOPE to intelligence staffs around the
world.
The SCOPE programme team is based in a part of the Cabinet
Office which is at the heart of the government's intelligence
machinery. The cost is classified.
2) Cabinet Office -
Information Assurance Technical Programme. A cross-government
programme in which CESG, the commercial IT security arm of GCHQ,
leads on delivery as the main supplier and interface with the
information assurance industry.
3) Department for Children, Schools and Families -
ContactPoint database.
4) Department for Culture, Media and Sport - IT support for the
Olympics and Paralympics
Games and Legacy Delivery programme.
5) Department of Health - National Programme for IT, including
the Care Records Service, Choose and Book and e-prescriptions.
Estimated cost: £12.7bn.
6) Department for Transport - IT support for Crossrail
7) Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) - £178m Central
Payments System to bring together benefits information from a
number of legacy systems and cut fraud.
8) DWP - £598 Pensions Transformation Programme reduces
complexity, cuts time for staff training and stops pensioners who
claim several benefits giving their details repeatedly.
9)
DWP Change Programme - £246m
10) DWP - Contracts worth billions of pounds for communications
and the support of up to 140,000 desktop and laptops are due to be
awarded over the next six years.
11) Foreign and Commonwealth Office - £401m Future Firecrest
system
12) HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) - MPPC programme to bring
together PAYE systems and information on more than 25 million
taxpayers.
13) HMRC: Tax Credits Transformation programme to reduce error
and fraud.
14) Home Office - the
Vetting and
Barring Scheme (also involves Department of Health, the
Department for Children, Schools and Families, Criminal Records
Bureau and Independent Safeguarding Authority).
15) Home Office National Policing Improvement Agency -
"Impact"
police-based programme for intelligence sharing. The project
includes a Police
National Database.
16) Home Office:
e-borders, due to be fully operational in 2014
17) Home Office £234m
National Offender Management Information System - rollout of IT to
all prisons.
18) Identity and Passport Service - ID Cards, including National
Identity Register. Cost of about £5bn over 10 years but most of the
cost is
tied in with biometric passports which, in practice, cannot be
scrapped.
19) Ministry of Defence (MoD) - Defence Information
Infrastructure - £2bn-£3bn contractually committed so far but total
costs estimated at about £7bn.
20) MoD -
whole fleet management
21) MoD -
Bowman
This article is based on information on the government's
mission-critical projects provided by the Office of government
Commerce in reply to a question by Public Accounts Committee MP
Richard Bacon.