” IT disasters…
E-Borders (Cancelled June 2011)
The scheme was originally created to check passenger details against UK police immigration watch lists. The Government tore up supplier Raytheon’s £742m contract on the e-Borders immigration programme in July last year, after delays led the Home Office committee to say it had “no confidence”in the company.
Department Home Office
Cost £118m
ID Cards (Cancelled in January 2011)
Ministers claimed ID cards would help in the fight against illegal immigration and terrorism by storing details of all UK citizens on a centralised database. The scheme proved unpopular and was scrapped in January this year.
Department Home Office
Cost £257m (Source: Home Office)
Electoral register database (Cancelled in July 2011)
Plans to create an expensive database of electors were abandoned by the Government last month. The Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors (Core) was legislated for in 2006 and intended to make it easier for political parties to verify the legitimacy of their donors.
Department Ministry of Justice
Cost The database, which would have been administered by a new independent public body, would have cost an estimated £11.4m.
Firecontrol (Cancelled in December 2010)
Firecontrol aimed to replace 46 fire control centres in England with nine regional sites. The project was scrapped in December 2010 after suffering a series of delays, increased costs and an inadequate IT contract, according to a select committee report.
Department Communities and Local Government
Cost £469m (Source: National Audit Office)
Scope 2 (Cancelled July 2009)
The project was designed to allow the secure sharing of sensitive intelligence data between relevant departments in government and officials abroad. It was cancelled after reports of technological problems and escalating costs.
Department Cabinet Office
Cost £24.4m (Source: Cabinet Office)
Story of a sick system
October 2002 The Department for Health launches the NHS National Programme for IT, in a bid to create an electronic care record for patients in England and connect 30,000 general practitioners to 300 hospitals.
2006 Accenture, the largest contractor, walks out on contracts worth £2bn, writing off hundreds of millions of pounds in the process. Months earlier, the US software supplier, IDX, also quit the project.
2007 The Government misses its first deadlines as a report by the King’s Fund criticises the Government’s “apparent reluctance to audit and evaluate the programme”.
2008 A report to the Enfield Primary Care Trust reveals difficulties with the system the previous year saw 63 patients of the Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS trust have their operations delayed because of missing data. The trust previously found the system had failed to flag up possible child-abuse victims.
2009 An earlier Public Accounts Committee report notes that the project has provided “little clinical functionality… to date”. “
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