Home Office splashed £35m trying to escape e-Borders contract The Home Office has so far splashed £34.6m in legal costs to extract itself from the disastrous £750m e-Borders contract run by Raytheon, The Register can reveal. In 2007, the Home Office contracted the defence company to design its e-Borders technology system to provide secure border control. However, by 2010 it had …
It was over 5 years. But it's still ~50 prime ministers* working flat out all for that time. Or maybe they used some of the 170 civil servants who are paid over £150K a year?
* I didn't adjust for inflation because we haven't had any...
The bigger question for me is who the fuck allowed a contract for £750m to be signed without an exit clause?
Projects of this size are usually broken down into phases and one phase has to end before the next can begin. Each phase is costed and a project can be scrapped at the end of any one phase.(be it budget, performance, ability). This limits exposure by all parties. Usually phase 1 involves a pilot to prove the concept to stop stupidly convinced ideas becoming reality.
The stupidity of our overlords continues to amaze me.
Projects of this size are usually broken down into phases and one phase has to end before the next can begin.
That's assuming competent project structures and decent contract negotiations. Unfortunately, those skills have practically all migrated to consultancies where the use of one body will cost the salary of three, and where backdoor deals will be hard to prove.
The greatest test of an engineer is not his technical ingenuity but his ability to persuade those in power who do not want to be persuaded and convince those for whom the evidence of their own eyes is anything but convincing.
Extract from "Plain Words" in The Engineer 2nd October 1959
The purpose of the repeated appeals is to ensure that no contract with a big company can ever be cancelled by a Government department ever, no matter how bad the performance is. In the future, they can just say "so you think we're crap? Well, just pay up now, or you'll spend at least that and more on lawyers, and look stupid in the papers. Sign here."
No, the reason Raytheon don't want to lose is that it's probably not their fault. The coversation probably went:
Gov: "can we have an e-borders thing please"
Raytheon "be more specific"
Gov: "we know nothing about it, you design it"
Raytheon "No problemo, we'll need parameters though"
Gov: "We don't really have them, can you do it?"
Raytheon "No problemo, design phase will be x Million"
Gov "We need a fixed cost for the whole shebang including delivery, with a fixed timescale and you're blind bidding against 2 other companies so we look honest"
Raytheon "Very well, here is a timescale to deliver very specific X. Hope you don't mind, we made a buttload of assumptions because you didn't tell us anything"
Gov "No worries we'll add the detail later"
Raytheon "you can try, but any changes are on you my lovely"
Gov "La la la can't hear you..."
"No, the reason Raytheon don't want to lose is that it's probably not their fault. The coversation probably went:"
Not sure about that. A company as large as Raytheon should know that you never, ever get involved in poorly defined projects, especially large ones. It's a sure fire way of not delivering what the customer wants.
On top of that, I recall previous press reports that the whole idea was deeply mathematically flawed anyway. It's one thing for a customer asking for the moon on a stick. It's another thing entirely to tell the customer that you can deliver it without first checking that you have a moon and suitable stick handy.
I recall that the scheme was going to use a suite of biometric measurements to determine if a person at a border gate matched recorded details. Ok so far. However none of these measurements is totally reliable on its own, so the plan was to weight each measurement, add that all up and get a result. The flaw is that the requirements then conflict with the maths. The requirement was to let people in who should be let in, but keep people out if they're not the person named in a passport. The maths says that you have to set the weights to bias the system reliability one way or the other, but you cannot achieve good reliability for both. Thus the system was impossible to build.
Raytheon probably could have spotted that at the very beginning, and should have run away from the job.
From what I've seen in the past, contract law overrides physical and mathematical law (at least in the court system). Just because what is being asked for in the contract is not physically or mathematically achievable does not mean that the court will void the contract. A promise is a promise, no matter how stupid a promise it was.
Raytheon might also consider what the government will feel about them should they eventually win. It doesn't really matter what UK/EU law says about tendering for public projects, there would inevitably be a cultural reluctance in the civil service to award further work to Raytheon.
I also IBM did sucecssfully sue the Met Police (I think it was them) over a finger print recognition system the Met had commissioned. IBM built what was written down, the Met hadn't read their own requirements, didn't like what was delivered and didn't pay. The Met lost that one.
"A company as large as Raytheon should know that you never, ever get involved in poorly defined projects, especially large ones."
You've not worked with the public sector much then? Raytheon would close overnight if they didn't work on poorly defined projects!
It's a public sector problem which is linked to public perception. They have to award business in a bid process and usually do this in a bid, win, design, build manner where the winner must say upfront how much the design and build will cost while knowing very little requirements.
It's possible to do this as bid, win, design, bid, win, build so that the build phase could be properly scoped ahead of time. Unfortunately this results in CompanyA doing the design, CompanyB winning the build phase and then blaming CompanyA for the delays and problems. This isn't much better than the guesswork above.
Ideally, they would select a preferred partner based on competence rather than cost and then use them to design and build in a structured and well thought out project. Sadly, this leads to corruption or at least claims of corruption, bribery etc. in the public sector.
The private sector deals with this nicely. They simply don't care about perception of corruption and choose the best partner for the project then get on with it. If you can think of a way to fix the process then go ahead, I've thought it through and there doesn't seem to be a system which will give good results while also preventing corruption while also not affecting votes for the people bringing in such a system.
"there would inevitably be a cultural reluctance in the civil service to award further work to [the supplier]"
You're not from these parts are you.
If the procurement people did consider past behaviour as part of each new procurement (which spreadsheet column covers that? how?) then the well known "systems integrators" (no names, to avoid increased risk of moderation) would barely get any repeat business. Instead, a tiny handful of big companies regularly cock things up, regularly get shown up in public inquiries, and still regularly get repeat business.
Not good.
so you have clearly been directly involved in Govt Contracting.......
I have experienced that script personally twice during Govt contracting....
Oh and don't forget the 3rd party "independent" advisors to Govt who are responsible for Risk Management, Contracting Discipline, Procuerement phase timescales management and other such critical tasks who just melt into the background never to be heard of again once the contract is let.
Yet more noses in the trough or should I say Tax Payers back pockets when it comes to who really foots the bill for the colossal fuck ups.
Put simply Govt should not be allowed to purchase anything larger than a fucking paper clip....
Instead of legal action, the government should adopt Kinetic Action. Remind the fuckers on who has the monopoly on violence here - Send the SAS round to do a raid of the UK headquarters of Raytheon and their bank connection also - the bank is bound to be up to at least *some* money laundering and terrorist funding with Raytheon money, then go from there.
So this is now an appeal against an appeal against a court ruling. Why does it take three separate inquiries to decide this, when a court is meant to provide a final decision in the first place? And how much are the lawyers just laughing at getting paid three times for the same job?
Would love to see fines against the initial court whose ruling turned out to be wrong as a penalty for wasting everyone's time and money.
In the phase which led up to Parliament cancelling the project Serco were contracted to build out the servers, networks, firewalls up-to application server level. This was the second phase of the overall project.
In the first phase of works Serco were late delivering into Raytheon for their application deployment, integration and test.
Raytheon were banking on a 6 month slip by Serco in P2 when the worst thing in the world happened, Serco realising they were hugely behind schedule outsourced their part of the delivery who pulled back 6 month slip in 1 month with automated OS build, lots of engineers who actually "could" in the cage. Serco's build was completed before the new years eve, on time, and passed technical testing, i.e. turned around.
This left Raytheon massively exposed without a Serco late delivery to hide behind. It took 6 months for parliament to finally pull the plug on the deal. The facts are very simple (to somebody who became a standing army watching it all), Raytheon should have had their code ready for January 1st but by mid-summer the platform continued to be stood idle still waiting for any applications to be deployed.
"The civil servants still managed to screw up the contract and left the public exposed to excess costs"
Nothing new here. NHS contract cost, what, ten billion quid for nothing? A billion written off on the regional fire control centres. Multiple billions written off by the bunglers at DWP and the MoJ. Gazillions repeatedly written off on crap defence procurement. Two thirds of a billion written off on universal credit. Lord knows how many billion wasted on Gordon Brown's criminally incompetent PFI blunders. Something of the order of thirteen billion wasted annually on overseas aid to keep dictators in Mercedes, fight climate change in Peru, rebuild Gaza so the Israelis have got something to bomb next time. DECC are currently spending money at the rate of a third of a billion pounds a month for no useful outputs whatsoever (unless you like expensive electricity), and so it goes on.
This is the lasting legacy of Gordon Brown - a profligate, incompetent civil service that simply has no concept of the value of money, and a complete inability to stop pissing vast sums of public money up the wall: Easy come, easy go.
Clearly Labour are looking to go back to their old tricks, the Liberals would be quite happy to go along with that, and sadly the pathetic, lightweight due of Cameron & Osborne clearly aren't man enough for the job of deficit reduction either.
Well the Tories introduced PFI(*) and are still enthusiastic promoters of new PFI schemes, whereas Labour were/are indeed enthusiastic converts to the various ways in which figures can be fiddled.
It all comes down to the Westminster politicians need to keep in with the City - see also the various x-to-Buy schemes intended to funnel money to the banks et al while keeping asset values high. Whether this need is real or a fiction created by senior civil servants and special advisers is unclear.
(*) note for furriners: PFI is a technique by which large contracts, e.g. building a major hospital, are funded by the private sector rather than the government, in return for which the former receive guaranteed payments for 20 or 30 years ( and in some cases keep ownership of the land/buildings at the end of that period ); this allows the government to claim the cost is "off balance sheet" so they don't need to include it in their expenditure figures. One problem is that governments can raise large amounts of money significantly cheaper than private firms, so when calculating how much a PFI contract will save the taxpayer a special factor is applied to increase the nominal cost of the public sector stumping up the money; this factor varies for each contract to ensure a decent estimate for the amount saved. In practice there is no long term obligation for this saving to be realised.
@arrbee
The description of PFI missed the bit about the PFI contrcting consortia including banks, who borrow the money from the Bank of England at considerably less than market rates. Thus the whole scheme is an accounting sleight of hand to transfer public funds to private, while moving the cost of capital projects from one arbitary ledger column to another.
Lets not forget that Thatcher left office with dignity and remains a highly regarded transformational states-person who did a lot of global good.
Gordo Brown-Nose leaves office to obscurity bitching about how Tony B Liar has pocketed £millions in personal wealth for his blood sucking wife and children.
Tony B Liar continues to sit on the side lines of the carnage in the middle-east whilst claiming to by an envoy for peace. All done whilst brokering personally lucrative contracts with shady despots and dictators around the world and protesting his innocence over claims of conflicts of interest and his war mongering following 911.
Labour at one with and for the people; I don't think so.
In the UK now all we have career politicians who focus on celebrity and personal gain and have lost the total focus required to hold office as true Public Servants.
The system is corrupt and broken with no solution in sight from any party.....
A thorough and disappointing summary of recent Govt contracting failures
How fucking depressing, all that money just pissed away by half wits who don't care and are not held responsible...
Without ownership, responsibility and diligence and commitment we will continue to suffer these embarrassing failures in Public Service.
Whether its is poor requirements specification on the part of the buyer or whether it is "commissions fuelled greed" of the suppliers who commit to being able to design, build and supply anything within time, budget and resources there has to be responsibility and ownership.
If you cannot specify to a reasonable level they don't buy
If you don't understand what is to be supplied don't commit to supply
In the absence of either of the above if you still want to do business then there must be a requirements analysis phase of the project
Follow this with a proof of concept phase which must be formally tested, reviewed for effectiveness and approved before enterprise implementation.
its really not that hard.......
unless of course there is no willingness to get it right because there are no consequences for anyone involved as no one has ownership or responsibility for the outcomes be they good or bad.......
And there we have it "OWNERSHIP, RESPONSIBILITY, CONSEQUENCES" all missing in Govt contracting
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