It boggles the mind that when this government contracts for an IT system they cant seem to hold the companies responsible to deliver on target, on budget and meeting the specifications. I can't think of any Labour inspired IT project that works as spec'd out and certainly not on time or budget. Companies like EDS must love this bunch of incompetents in power as I suspect the project is really a moving target as Ministers keep changing their minds about what they want from it. This gives the contractor a legal excuse to bump up costs, charge for cancellation or re-write the terms every time a minister sneezes. Nice earner if you can get it but at least it keeps thousands of programmers off the dole even if they never finish their work !!!

Mike, Alicante, Spain

Take two public sector bodies, one, among the sharpest performing public sector organisations and another that consistently fails to meet expectations and targets. Now amalgamate these organisations and then choose your management team overwhelmingly from the latter. No, this would never happen.........think again. Enter NOMS.

NOMS encompasses a Prison Service, that despite the very best efforts of polititians to put more and more people away without funding additional prison places, still meets the vast majority of key performance targets set and an ailing Probation Service. NOMS is mainly run by people originally from the upper echelons of the Probation Service who have plenty of wooly ideas and no idea of how to implement them.

The Offender Management Model sounded great on paper, but people working at the "coal face", both prison and probation staff, warned that it would be an unmitigated and expensive distaster. And so it has come to pass.

Callum, Bury, Lancashire

How does the Government keep getting away with these "collapses"? If any other company kept scrapping multi-million pound computer systems, shareholders etc would be throwing themselves off cliffs. Either that or throwing the management off cliffs.

Oliver Hancock, Pulborough, W. Sussex

It's about time that the Government put in place some decent general management/project management professionals at the client interface to make sound judgements on selection / appraisal of proposals instead of relying on the expertise of the companies vying for contracts. There is something fundamentally wrong in the civil service these days and it must be systemic. What has happened to the Civil Service? Why is it so appalling or was it ever thus and we have had the wool pulled over our eyes all these years by politicians who are never prepared to admit they couldn't manage a welks stall,

John P Green, Wokingham, Berks

It has been a major faliing to not include VAT in the costings. Why was it not picked up earlier? The Civil Service does not have a pool of project manager experts that they need to run all the IT projects that the Government give them.
I wait with bated breath for the monumental cock-up that will be the ID card IT project.

Neil Walton, Bicester, Oxon

Government (and Civil Servent) handling of these projects is awful with sloping shoulders everywhere, and the 'Gateways' that are meant to help control such projects do little more than confirm that documentation exists. The big companies that always win these projects, like EDS, Cap Gemini, Siemens, IBM, Atos Origin etc. fill whole floors of offices with bums-on-seats that do nothing but make work for each other, while charging them out at £1000 or £2000 a day.

If the contracts were awarded to medium-sized or small companies, companies that have to live on their reputations, the chances of success would be much greater. It would also help if the end-users took the time and effort to hammer out their requirements precisely, to have their own in-house Project Manager(s), and to have top class lawyers draw up water-tight contracts, preferably awarded on a fixed price basis.

Tom, Copenhagen, Denmark

Waste, waste, waste...and more waste. Incompetents!

Judy , Liverpool, england

How in God's name do EDS keep getting Government contracts? Am I the only person who remembers all the other times this company has cost us tens of millions of pounds for defective or non-operational computer programs?

Neil S, Glasgow , Scotland

Another cock-up by our "leaders". We need competent businesspeople in Parliament and the services that design, prepare tenders, and select and award the contracts. And the contracts must also have clauses that protect the taxpayers if the promised benefits are not evident. That includes paying back as much of the cash paid out as possible.

Computers are supposed to save employing people to a certain degree yet the civil service is bigger under Nu labour that it has ever been.

B J Deller, Marbella, Spain

btw, I forgot to mention that this is not restricted to public sector as well. Certain investment bank in London is doing to the same to their IT system. Throw enough money at a project and it will eventually deliver - that's the mentality of some middle management people. It is EASY for them to do that - after all, it is the developer who get the rap in the end.

martin, london,

The money would have been better spent on new prison buildings to enable more offenders to be locked up

David, Nottingham,

So "cancelling the project will cost the Ministry of Justice £50 million in fees to EDS, the private contractor in charge of developing the system".
Presumably that actually means it will cost us tax-payers £50 million, not the ministers who approved the project.
And, if past experience is anything to go by, the private contractors involved will get yet more public sector contracts in which to exhibit their expertise.

Eric , London, England

Ridiculous. This Government needs to find a way to make all this succeed. This is all at the very top of most people's agenda in this country.

pauline hodson, stoke on trent, england

...and you haven't mentioned NHS Connecting for Health, the Child Support Agency, Air Traffic Control, tax credits, single farm payments, criminal records checks for teachers, etc.
As usual no minister will be held to account for yet another dismal failure. Has any Government IT project ever been delivered on time and on budget?

Nick, London,

Can't wait till they bring in ID cards - that'll probably bankrupt the whole country...!

Rod Munch, Northampton, UK

Oh well never mind ... it's only tax payers money ...

Benzo, Nr Chelmsford,

Totally predictable that yet another IT project managed by incompetent civil servants delivered by avaricious consultants should collapse. Yet the consultants always seem to get paid, however pathetic the results of their work. But as I have shown in my book "Plundering the Public Sector" about £70 billion of taxpayers' money will be handed over by New Labour to management and IT consultants for work that is mostly junk. Don't ever say you weren't warned.

David Craig
Author: "Plundering the Public Sector", london, UK

For those in the IT sector, it is frustrating that when such high profile IT projects fail, it catches the headlines. Everyday, many more IT projects that are far more complicated are delivered on time and on budget.
I had worked for and with many of those "international" IT consultancy firm. This is how they work: High power lunch/entertainment, fancy HQ in London, win the contract and then just bring in contractors from the open market. The money seldom filter down to the one delivering the solution. It often goes to the management.
I tried to bid for a government project together with couple of mats who are in the same business. We do not even qualify to build a simple web site for a local borough because our turnover is less than 3 million and we had not been in business for more than 5 years. A company that I used to work for won the contract and then try to sub-contract the work to us for 1/3 value. Go figure if this project is going to fail if whoever does it do it for 1/3.

martin, london,

Nothing surprising there. Pie-in-the-sky projects are doomed to failure from the get-go. Unfortunately not until millions of tax dollars that could have gone to help the disadvantaged, schools, NHS et al are down the old crapper. One does wonder who thinks up this stuff and more importantly why the government buys into it. Now there would be cause for an investigation but of course that will never happen because, well just because. . .

Shirley Hodge, Glasgow, E. Renfrewshire