back to article Gov to take axe to big IT contracts soon, will hand chunks to SMEs

Chief executive of the civil service, John Manzoni, has promised the government will start chopping up its big IT contracts in the next year and kick its dependency on just a handful of suppliers. Amyas Morse, auditor general at the National Audit Office, told the Public Accounts Committee yesterday that 51 per cent of …

  1. BurnT'offering

    Whitehall needs to bring in "thousands" of technical staff

    But can't offer private sector salaries and wage increases are capped at 1% for at least the life of this government.

    1. Franco

      Re: Whitehall needs to bring in "thousands" of technical staff

      And as of next year won't be able to offer competitive rates to contractors either.

      1. Stevie

        Re: Whitehall needs to bring in "thousands" of technical staff

        But you'd think that the government would be able to come up with some sort of incentive To attract new hires. Now what do they control that they could usfully use to make a government job more attractive to someone, someone working for less money up front who would need to make that stretch further? How to make it feel like the take-home pay is actually more than it is? Even some gross measure that would net some sort of advantage...

        1. BurnT'offering

          Re: Whitehall needs to bring in "thousands" of technical staff

          Is it, giving them all seats in the House of Lords?

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    FAIL

    "No one knows exactly how much money is spent on IT across the public sectors"

    And how exactly is that justified ? It's the PUBLIC sector. Amounts should be known to the cent.

    This is really just one sign of how badly this whole thing is managed.

    1. Rosie Davies

      Re: "No one knows exactly how much money is spent on IT across the public sectors"

      We don't do cents here in the UK, we do pennies. We dropped the shillings a while ago though mostly for the look of things as we felt we needed to keep the pound.

      Given the amount of petty empire building, silo based working and rigidly enforced boundaries between departments I'm not at all surprised that nothing is properly measured nor likely to be properly measured in the near future. The upside is that it saves us from a viciously efficient government, the downside that we haven't the faintest how much anything costs other than "too much".

      Rosie

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
        Trollface

        I understand now. God save us from a viciously efficient government indeed. The blundering, drunken, corrupt powerfests of governments we have now are bad enough.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        We don't do cents here in the UK,

        Sure you do, you just call them pennies like Americans do. You could take the high ground back n the sixties, when pennies were identifiably different in every way to the American cent, but after making the math easier the coins even look much the same.

        That's what happens if the need to divide only by ten overpowers you to the point you change your currency (and later your weights and measures).

        Before you scream and leap I remember watching "Decimal Five" with the interminal indoctrinal jingles by Roger McGough, and have proper pennies with a faint outline of HRH Victoria on them in a tin at home.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    mentioned on here before about the stupidity of some (public sector) IT procurement rules: we have to do everything possible to encourage SMEs - as long as their turnover > £50m, they are an existing supplier (or willing to jump through ridiculous hoops, including in many cases standard terms and conditions over 100 pages long) and have no track record of dismal failure. No, wait, looking at the existing large suppliers, that last item is a requirement.

  4. HmmmYes

    Why do people always assume that the Civil service/public sector are only crap at IT?

    I'm sure they are just as bad at any other of their supposed core skills - legal, operations, facilities management, planning.

    1. PaulAb

      Spot on!

      Still too many maggots hanging on for dear life for those mid fifties government pensions that most people will only dream of in their late 60's - Remember government departments, why be successful when you can just suck.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Joke

        Re: Spot on!

        If your job sucks, do it the American Way, Half-assed - Homer Simpson

  5. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

    But why would any smaller SME want to...

    Not withstanding the huge time and cost that needs to be accounted for to jump through the ludicrous procurement and supplier management hoops and general bureaucracy; in terms of getting paid, any smaller supplier would need to be nuts to consider working under any larger programme framework when due to no fault of theirs, they are unable to deliver due to the whole programme going tits-up further up the food chain.

    1. Otto is a bear.

      Re: But why would any smaller SME want to...

      Or for that matter endure the new minister/government/Agency CEO coming in and putting everything on hold until they are happy with it.

      You need very deep pockets to endure the kind of behaviour that Departments are used to meeting out to their suppliers. Woe betide you if you kick up and try to charge for lost time. You may be entitled, but you won't get another contract.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: But why would any smaller SME want to...

        just Google (or DuckDuckGo) "MoJ Buddi"

        second on the list is:

        http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/06/buddi_withdraws_from_moj_tagging_contract/

  6. Harry Kiri

    I almost bid for some Home Office work. Then in the small business T&Cs they wanted all foreground IP (OK, you're paying for that) but then all the background IP (so all of the expertise and specialist knowledge that makes us useful as an SME).

    The only reason? We get your knowledge and hand it over 'to someone who is capable of delivering the work'.

    We gave up at that point as being an SME our knowledge is our secret sauce...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > We gave up at that point as being an SME our knowledge is our secret sauce...

      Submit two prices in your tender: £x for the work; £1000x or £10,000x if background IP is included.

      If you just drop out then Government never learns the reason why.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Coming soon...

    Multiple firms operating under an umbrella to hold the contracts.

    This wont filter down to small outfits like mine.

    Even if it does it wont be practical.

    Government tenders are massively over complicated and have requirements that SMEs cant cater for.

    Theres a government funded tender doing the rounds at the moment for a simple website build. Ive had a few "outsourcers" mention it to me and try to offer me 25% of the budget.

    The sad thing is, even though I can do this stood on my head, I know the tender will go to an outsourcer.

    For most IT stuff you cant have a balls to the wall style formal tender process for. It requires discussion and planning.

    These things cannot be reflected in a proposal.

    More importantly you cannot determine whether or not you can keep a project within budget without discussions taking place.

    Hell, you need discussions to take place just to understand the business and the people you'll be working with.

    Who wants to win a contract only to find out the people you'll be working with are just pointy haired bosses?

    For those interested the tender I speak of is here:

    http://www.coast2capital.org.uk/images/C2C_Website_Tender_March_2016.pdf

    Its open to everyone, apparently.

    I bet it goes to a firm already associated with the organisation and thentender is up there just to comply with government regulation.

  8. Anonymous Curd

    Picking on Aspire? Hah, that's probably one of the most effective IT contracts in government. Sure you're paying £500 to Fujitsu to move a desktop to the other side of your office, but it carries at least £500bn of transactions for about 0.2% of that as annual spend. It's also not *that* monolithic - there's six companies in it. Not the one to pick on, particularly given the decommissioning strategy actually involves HMRC setting up a wholly owned private corporation to hold the TUPE'd staff. This enables them to pay them private sector rates without all the bother of public sector bidding/FOI.

    This happens every other year. More SMEs. More Agility. Great. Wonderful.

    Until the contracts get involved.

    SMEs don't have the ability to loss-lead, so won't bid for the less glamorous nuts and bolts work. Likewise they can't flex and take the hit to crunch on at-risk Project A to keep the customer happy across Projects B, C, D and E. SMEs don't have the resources to spend £20-30k a pop preparing the CabO-mandated RFI/RFP forms, which often run to thousands of pages of detailed responses, assuming they're even an existing supplier (if not, add another few hundred to register as a supplier). SMEs don't have a bottomless pit of insurance backing them, so can't be awarded anything bigger than a few million quid or a couple of years. SMEs stop being SMEs the second they start scaling to meet the demands of a growing contract (assuming they even can scale). SMEs don't have 10-20+ years of "proven delivery experience" to meet the CabO due diligence requirements. SMEs aren't List X, so usually need a bigger parent company to act as Prime whatever happens.

    Perhaps most fundamentally, the really good SMEs, the ones people are thinking of when this kind of stuff is bandied around, won't work for a public sector rate.

    I would love for public sector contracts to be smaller, more easily governed and delivered by smart, focused teams of experts. Unfortunately the commercial and contractual reality precludes that entirely. Until that changes, all that will happen is a changing of hats, with shell companies set up to host a bid from a major SI with a handful of token SMEs in a 90/10 workshare. Which is what happens anyway - we just call them contractors.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Will this really save money?

    Yeah, splitting the contracts will probably result in paying less overall, but then you have add staff (or hire another company) to coordinate all your suppliers. Sounds like a job program for project managers.

  10. Mike Thomas

    Why doesn't the Government know how much they spend? Because they ask all the non-SME's they contract with to report on how much they spend with SME's on Government contracts.

    As the larger suppliers don't run accounting software that differentiates between SME vs Non SME ( or carbon emissions or ethnic backgrounds or sexual persuasion) never mind between each individual sales contract, then it's a complete guessing game.

    You know how much they buy, because you can get a report for that. After that it's guess work.

    It would be better if the government first decided on a target that they could measure accurately. Directly awarded contracts. They can then measure it themselves. But they would mean they couldn't fudge the figures.

    SME's are very important, but using an SME should be in context. Just because you engage an SME doesn't mean it's better. it often depends on the resource required and the value add given. It's a bit like setting a target to use small spanners in a garage. So less simple nonsense targets please and more smart objectives.

  11. organiser

    Awarding more contracts to SMEs is not going to happen as long as may public sector institutions insist on £10 million professional indemnity cover. Insurers provide £1 million quite easily, £2 million after a lengthy interview and then maybe £5 million after serious consideration (but never to SMEs). £10 million is bespoke.

    The UAL recently had a tender out where they required £10 million professional indemnity cover. The value of the contract itself was around £160,000. The contract was awarded to a 'SME' - the UK subsidiary of a large, Israeli multinational.

    1. Franco

      Not just insurance, when I worked for a small company we put a bid in for some work for a local council organisation and the ISO certification they wanted before even letting us bid would have cost more than our turnover at the time.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If I hear one more Minister or 'Small Business Czar' saying they want to get more Government business to SME's I'll puke

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