Government and IT - "a recipe for rip-offs" : time for a new approach, further report, with the Government response to the Committee's twelfth report of session 2010-12, twentieth report of session 2010-12, report and appendices, together with formal minutes

Government IT procurement strategy is still lacking in its commitment to independent benchmarking of contracts with transparent data, failing to understand the risks of legacy systems, remains unclear about how to address the IT skills gap with sufficiently senior and experienced people, and must move faster to implement 'digital by default' to design better IT services. Government must build "in house" contracting capacity if it is to achieve its intended cost reductions and address the significant challenges facing it in large procurement projects.

This follow up report commends the Government for its generally constructive and proactive response, but points out key areas where the intended course of action will not be sufficient to address "the scale of behavioural and process change required across government" to achieve its own aims of becoming an "intelligent" customer.

The Government has also failed to respond at all to the call for an investigation into the charge that the large systems integrators operate in the manner of a cartel. The report concludes that a lack of up-to-date and accurate information about government IT made it impossible to identify potential overcharging, leading to the waste of an "obscene amount of public money".

It recommends an independent investigation into allegations of cartel-like behaviour among suppliers, and that the Government work with "independent and specialist advisers and the NAO" to "seek to identify reliable and comparable cost benchmarks, and collect accurate information from departments in order to compare with those benchmarks."