Government IT spending has been attacked as “weak” by the outgoing chairman of the Public Accounts Committee.

In an open letter to his successor at the Parliamentary watchdog, Edward Leigh MP slammed the procurement of new IT systems as “over-ambitious, overly complex and failing to deliver what is promised while costs rocket”.

“Time and again, departments have wasted millions on IT systems that fail to live up to promise, come in late and cost hugely more than forecast,” he wrote, adding these problems are the symptoms, rather than the cause, of data being “riddled with errors” and often lost.

Leigh used the Ministry of Defence’s new £7 billion Defence Information Infrastructure as an example of the problems, describing it as “fatally flawed by poor planning”, with the project left without a pilot despite its complexity. He added this wasn’t an isolated incident, with the Government plagued by a “lack of capacity to engage effectively with suppliers”, often being “ripped-off”.

A bunch of ‘Sir Humphreys’

He also attacked wider Government attitudes to spending, targeting flippant departments who “are seemingly unfazed by the odd £100 million going astray or by programmes failing to deliver vital services to the citizen”.

“We have had those who take the accountability process seriously and endeavour to answer our questions and meet our concerns, but we have had more who demonstrate that Sir Humphrey is alive and kicking, talking at length but saying little.”

Leigh has held his position as chairman for nine years and will be stepping down at the next election. He argued that, despite the flaws of Government spending, the watchdog committee was “a cornerstone of Parliamentary democracy”, and credited its recommendations to more than £4 billion of Government savings.

Is that a time warp? I read the same thing in Computing, when I started work in 1987!

And every few years since.

Changing requirements aren't a problem, the government needs to understand that they have changing requirements and pick a company to do the work that constantly works in way that changes don't matter so much, something like working to an agile methodology would do the trick, but you'd want people that work with the methodology everyday to execute it well.

I think that is down to a lack of skill within the civil service to actually manage such a project.