Ministers blast ‘shambolic’ IT overhaul

A Whitehall initiative to loosen the hold of big business on government contracts has come under fire from cabinet ministers, who have told the prime minister that “shambolic” IT provision by smaller firms has brought their departments to a virtual standstill in recent weeks.



Vince Cable, business secretary, and Ed Davey at the energy department told David Cameron last week that their officials had been struggling with intermittent email, internet and network connections since they started migrating to new computer systems in early May.

The switch from big IT firms to smaller suppliers has been heavily trailed by Francis Maude who is determined to end an “oligopoly” of large suppliers and hand a far bigger share of the £7bn government IT market to smaller companies.

The Cabinet Office minister’s aim is not only to extract more value for money but to take advantage of the innovation and agility of smaller players.

But Mr Cable fears that the combination of cost cutting and small firms could backfire. He has urged cabinet colleagues to refrain from renewing their IT until the government had fully considered “lessons could be learnt” from the debacle in his own department.

“Getting more SMEs in was an idealistic Tory policy in 2011 to shake up Whitehall,” remarked one official who had struggled with crawling computer systems in recent weeks. “But in effect they are not necessarily the best fit for this sort of task.”

Two people familiar with the difficulties in the business department said the problems had arisen as the consortium of small firms struggled to cope with the scale and pace of the migration of 3,000 officials on to the system.

“It has been shambolic,” said one person, with officials struggling to cope with lost data, slow connections, screen freezes, intermittent email and a crawling network.

One of the new providers, who preferred to remain anonymous, referred all questions to the government departments.

Cost cutting by another name.

They will rapidly discover that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys and that the bitter taste of poor quality remains long after the sweet taste of low price is forgotten.