Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been wasted on flawed government IT programmes with only 30 per cent of projects a success, a leading government technology expert has admitted.

The Government is spending about £14 billion a year on major IT projects, enough to build 7,000 primary schools or 75 new hospitals, the expert said. That means as much as £9.8 billion a year could have been squandered.

The figures were disclosed by Joe Harley, programme and systems delivery group director at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), at a conference this week.

It is the first time that the Government has admitted the scale of the problem. “Today only 30 per cent, we estimate, of our projects and programmes are successful,” Mr Harley told the government IT conference. “Why shouldn’t it be 90 per cent successful? It’s not sustainable for us as a government to continue to spend at these levels. We need to raise the quality of what we do at a reduced cost of doing so.”

He said that government information officers and suppliers had signed up to new targets to increase the success rate of projects and programmes to 90 per cent by 2010-11.

His remarks to the conference were reported by the journal Computer Weekly.

A DWP official said that Mr Harley had been quoting from a report on complex IT projects that was commissioned by the British Computer Society.

The department has presided over two of the biggest IT fiascos in Whitehall. The Child Support Agency phone system was introduced in April 2003, two years late and £56 million over budget. The 1.2 million existing cases could not be put on the new system because it failed to work.

A benefits programme that was set up in December 2003 to streamline the payment of benefits aimed to save £60 million by picking up new and repeat claims by telephone and the internet. That system was shelved last year.

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