back to article UK Cabinet Office's £200m IT bonanza: I got 999 contracts but a pitch ain't won (yet)

The UK government is seeking as many as 999 firms to provide a raft of tech services across the public sector, according to a contract notice in the Official Journal of the European Union. The Cabinet Office, acting via government procurement body Crown Commercial Services, is splitting the Technology Services framework into …

  1. frank ly

    "... as many as 999 firms ..."

    Is that because they set the data field up for only three digits?

    1. HollyHopDrive

      Re: "... as many as 999 firms ..."

      How very cynical.

      I think you have failed to see the success that outsourcing has clearly delivered in this instance. If this had still been done in house this would have been 2 digits so this is a 33% field size increase delivering a whopping 10x number size storage ability. Now that's good value.

      Honestly some people..... ;-)

  2. BearishTendencies

    There will be no problem in certifying suppliers

    They won't. Same as G-Cloud. Just a big shit list that anyone who bothers to put the paperwork together gets on.

    Which is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Unless you are CCS and Cabinet Office. Then you can say you're helping SMEs by doing nothing much except being complicit in helping businesses avoid procurement law. Oh, and a nice rake off the top for doing nothing.

  3. Stretch

    Ah you seem to list all the most shitty, unreliable and useless companies I can think of.

  4. Warm Braw

    Public sector contracts...

    I once had an IT contract with a local authority that required that I should not bring earth-moving equipment onto the works site until permission had been granted (once of the many clauses they'd retained when they cut-and-pasted from a road-building contract). Of course, no-one had the authority to modify the contract so that it was more appropriate to the services being provided. I think, technically, I was obliged to wear a hard hat whenever I had a meeting with them.

    I'm sure the nice people at the Cabinet Office have all that sort of nonsense cracked. Though I'd suggest a clause requiring bio-hazard suits if you ever have to meet them on their home turf...

    1. thames

      Re: Public sector contracts...

      I've dealt with contracts originating from very large multinational private sector companies that were worse. The standard (and immutable) T&Cs that came down from the central legal department specified that equipment warranty lifetimes were in number of kilometres driven. Since the equipment in question was a rather large and immobile production line for a factory, we were left with simply hoping that the contracts never ended up in court.

      The highly paid central services legal team appeared to have simply copy and pasted the T&C paragraphs from a car lease agreement. They seemed to have no clue as to the existence of things such as factories. This was rather odd considering that they worked for one of the world's largest manufacturing companies (manufacturing as in actually made things themselves, not as in bought some Chinese tat and slapped their name on it). Fortunately, it also appeared that nobody bothered reading any of the fine print before signing the contracts, because it was several years before anyone bothered to question the wording (not that it ever got fixed).

      Once again, the private sector shows how it can outperform the public sector in every way, including bureaucratic inertia, generating mindless mountains of pointless paperwork, and having purchasing people that have no clue of what was being bought.

  5. NeilMc

    why 999

    well its because of failures in the End User IT services contract at the Cabinet Office Procurement (under another contract naturally); all monitors were installed upside down...... and no one has yet noticed.

    One of the Procurement wieners must be a devilish worshipper..........999 or 666?

    You decide................

    failing that I can only imagine with so many suppliers actually choosing one will be the most enormous game of IP DIP DOG DOODY.......

    There can be no other explanation, the costs to both parties of initial contracting and on going relationship maintenance will be huge and of little tangible value to most of the bidders.

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