IT cuts contribute to £500m Whitehall savings
£1bn of tech projects under spending spotlight
A freeze on IT spending in Whitehall has contributed to £500m being cut from the cost of running government, official figures revealed yesterday.
The coalition government announced it had saved £500m this year as a result of a revising spending on IT, consulting, marketing, property and recruitment.
The IT savings stem from the government's decision to freeze spending on all IT projects costing more than £1m while it reviews them to decide whether they should be reduced in scope or abolished. About £1bn-worth of IT projects will be scrutinised under the spending review.
Cuts to IT projects have helped the government to save £500m
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The government also expects to cut the amount it spends with its largest suppliers - most of which are IT vendors - by more than £800m this year as a result of contract renegotiations. A further £402m has been saved by abolishing major projects such as ID cards.
Yesterday the government also revealed the full list of projects being examined under the IT spending review.
It emerged that the £2.34m Public Sector Network programme to create standardised network services across the public sector and an £180m mobile framework contract had been exempt from the review because it was felt that delaying those projects would have negative consequences.
Of the IT projects being reviewed, the projects with the highest total capital spend are:
- £1.4bn on the FiReControl project to provide IT infrastructure for new regional fire control rooms.
- £524m on the Department of Health's centralised Spine database.
- £479m on the Department of Health's Picture Archiving and Communication System for sharing scans and images.
- £311m on the G-Cloud project to create a government cloud computing platform and app store and cut the number of datacentres across the public sector.
- £305m on the cost of delivering the Department of Health's National Programme for IT projects in the south of England