WRITTEN ON June 3rd, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Save Time and Money, What do we want?

Hey – the Cabinet Office likes to put out bossy papers but can’t lay its hands on what it spends on IT projects. Iain Brown asked them

for details of the overall spending by Cabinet Office on the following projects and capabilities since 1st January 2005 and which companies this expenditure has been placed with:

• Flex
• e-RM
• e-Transformation
• The Knowledge Network
• HR and Finance Shared Services
• Government Secure Intranet

Jerry Page replies

I can confirm that the Cabinet Office holds information falling within the description
specified in your requests. However, we estimate that cost of complying with your request
would exceed the appropriate limit of £600. The appropriate limit has been specified in
regulations and for central Government is £600. This represents the estimated cost of one
person spending 31⁄2 working days in determining whether the Department holds the information,
and locating, retrieving and extracting the information. Under section 12 of the Act the Department
is not obliged to comply with your request and we will not be processing your request further.

If you were to make a new request for a more narrow category of information, it may be
that we could comply with that request within the appropriate limit, although I cannot
guarantee that this will be the case.

Wibbi they just asked Kable. That’s what everyone else does.

Wibbi also the traibe of Cab-in-a-Toffice got their own house in order instead of laying bossy pontificating and centralising IT strategies on OGDs (as the rest of Whitehall is referred to) and the wider public sector (where most of the useful work happens).

From http://www.whatdotheyknow.com

3 Responses to “Cabinet Office can’t lay its hands on IT spend data”

 
Guy Herbert wrote on June 4th, 2008 9:03 am :

I wonder whether the Cabinet Office might not come up with the same answer if Iain were to re-ask about just one project? It would be very interesting if it did.

silvasurfer wrote on June 6th, 2008 12:40 am :

So ask HMRC how much they spent on “DOTF” – a miserable attenpt at open source which spent upwards of £60m and completely failed … and by the way, Direct.gov in its various brands has spent well over £100m and more….. most of it went on consultants building up their own companies.

alex wrote on June 8th, 2008 12:43 am :

guy and others

there is no point asking foi questions

better to ask the public accounts committee

when they went to work, they asked the NAO

they tried to find the money but could not in this report

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmpubacc.htm

I think the highest paid consultancy got £ 400,000 for their work. you would have to go to companies house to get the director

I don’t think it is giles chichester on this one

there is more than one gravy train in the eu though and not a citizen has yet got on one ; they tend to leave the station with politicians and others in first class first