UK Wastes 10 Billion on NHS Computer System - Where Did The Money Go?

The decade long omnishambles rumbles on:

Quote:

An abandoned NHS patient record system has so far cost the taxpayer nearly £10bn, with the final bill for what would have been the world's largest civilian computer system likely to be several hundreds of millions of pounds higher, according a highly critical report from parliament's public spending watchdog. MPs on the public accounts committee said final costs are expected to increase beyond the existing £9.8bn because new regional IT systems for the NHS, introduced to replace the National Programme for IT, are also being poorly managed and are riven with their own contractual wrangles. When the original plan was abandoned the total bill was expected to be £6.4bn. Richard Bacon, a Conservative member of the committee, said the report was further evidence of a "systemic failure" in the government's ability to draw up and manage large IT contracts. "This saga is one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector. "Yet, as the much more recent universal credit project shows, there is still a long way to go before government departments can honestly say that they have learned and properly applied the lessons from previous contracting failures." Previous IT-related government problems have included a breakdown of the child support agency, which left thousands of families without money; chaos within the passport agency; a tax credit system which was left vulnerable to fraud; late payments from the rural payments agency; and difficulties in tracking foreign national prisoners. snip The PAC report highlighted a new NHS computer system called Lorenzo which was supposed to store data for 220 trusts in the north, eastern England and the Midlands at a cost of £3.1bn. But the final contract for that project alone is likely to cost the Department of Health £2.2bn and cover only 22 trusts, MPs said. Successive ministers and civil servants have been blamed by committee members for the NHS project, which has been described as the biggest IT failure ever seen. Bacon, who has co-written a book on failing government projects, said that the NHS's particular problems stem from the original contracts signed before 2002. "The department [of health]'s latest estimate of £9.8bn leaves out the future costs of Lorenzo or the potential large future costs arising from the department's termination of Fujitsu's contract for care records systems in the South of England. It is a pitiful waste," he said.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2...ds-system-10bn



Where has that money all ended up? 10 billion straight into the pockets of the computer software companies who failed to deliver the product? And could someone explain how designing what was in effect a big database (surely database software isn't that complex?) to store information was so difficult and costly?

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