NHS IT programme "on budget"

The Register is reporting that the huge NHS IT project the UK Government is running has cost twice what was projected. But, apparently, this doesn’t mean that it’s gone over budget.

The £6.2bn National Programme for IT will henceforward be known as the £12.4bn National Programme for IT, after a long-awaited National Audit Office report into the ambitious NHS IT scheme revealed the full extent of its costs to date.
But the Department of Health always knew it was going to cost as much as £12.5bn, it said today, even in those days when it said the programme was going to cost half as much.
Moreover, it insisted today, that the doubled price tag did not mean that the Programme has gone over-budget…
“The NAO has confirmed the cost has not overrun,” he said. And anyway, the costs were not important.

So, either they were lying when they were saying that the budget was £6.2bn (knowing full well that it would cost at least twice that) or we’ve entered some strange world in which budgets are retrospectively declared to be whatever we find convenient at the moment – which renders them totally irrelevant.

If nothing else, all this shows once again that the UK Government can’t run IT projects, especially big ones, and keep them on time or on budget. Anyone heard anything recently about the UK Police’s National Firearms Register, now passed its tenth anniversary and still not rolled out?

pax et bonum

Article posted at 3:19pm on 16 June 2006
Category: Computers, Politics, General