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back to article Capita gets £60m deal to merge NHS websites

Capita has launched the bundled-together NHS websites - NHS Direct and NHS Choices. It was named as preferred supplier in July. The DoH is paying £60m for three years, with an option to extend that for another two years. The site offers information on symptoms, courtesy of NHS Direct, as well as a directory of NHS services. …

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  1. Liam

    wtf?

    £20M a year for a website?

    mannn i need to get one of these gov contracts! i canmiss deadlines, overcharge and lose data for a lot less than that!

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Title? Why?

    Are UK.gov.biz on the same planet as the rest of us? Paying £60m to combine two websites?? Just get the f*ck out! NOW! (Not that the other bloody lot will be any bloody different!! *sigh)

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What a surprise

    No-knowledge public sector IT spenders go with the Crapita contract. Glad to see anyone learns any lessons, ever.

    (Disclosure: I work for a company that provides award-winning IT service to local/national government, but against whom Crapita's top-notch sales team sometimes win bids, despite Crapita's consistently shocking work)

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  4. BRYN
    Alert

    Ex captia staff

    I worked for Capita on a project for Abbey National car insurance.

    I was a campaign of errors and mismanagement. I shudder to think what a mess the NHS website will become.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Applause

    This is probably one of the best Register headlines ever. And quite appropriate too. We all are gong to be paying out of our pocket for something that can be done with one rack worth of blade servers running any odd load-balancing software configured by a beginner PFY.

    However, this is public sector, so value for the taxpayer's money is clearly not part of the equation. All hail the porkfest!!!

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  6. Brian O'Neill
    Pirate

    for once i am speechless...

    60 million for a website? What??

    How the hell can it cost that much? In public sector IT are numbers pulled at random?

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    I work for Capita...

    And the thought of them getting involved in the NHS has forced me into taking the decision to go private.

    AC for fairly obvious reasons, I hope!

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  8. Ni Khat
    Alert

    Most Expensive Website Ever

    For Lordy's sake, £20 MILLION per year for a website? Licence to print money or are Capita providing GOLD encrusted servers.

    Or does it include providing the on-call service as well?

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Wow. 60m? For a website?

    Is it just me, or would anyone else here like to have been offered that site building deal? I reckon I could have thrown together something pretty nifty for that much...

    I wonder how much of that budget is earmarked for talking shops. Preliminary planning meetings to discuss the optimal methodologies for deciding what type of chocolate biscuits to serve at the kickoff, kind of thing...

    The icon is a taxpayer's coat being rifled for any spare loose change...

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    article details

    Is the article true - i.e. all the facts in there. It cannot possibly be £60M for just combining and maintaining 2 web sites and running them for 3 years.

    At £1000 a day, £60m = 60,000 man days = 272 working man years of effort. Over 3 years, this is 90 people per year. What on earth are 90 very expensive people doing ?

    Can El Reg fire off a freedom of information act request to get the exact details of what the government has actually bought. In these recessionary times, I find it hard to believe money could possible be squandered in this way. Hence, the article could be misleading if it's not just a web site but some super AI query system being developed as well...

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  11. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Re: Applause.

    About 4-5 years ago both nhs.uk and nhsdirect.uk were running on 5 1u HP servers and a couple of DL580s for the database backend in the same rack with a handful of Cisco content switches and the other usual related gubbins. Then nhs.uk was moved to elsewhere...

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @ AC "Article Details"

    "Hence, the article could be misleading if it's not just a web site but some super AI query system being developed as well..."

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!!!!!

    It's **Capita**, what do YOU think?

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