IT MAY be dead but it has left a nasty smell. That’s the verdict of Public Finance (August 1) on the Government’s experiments with private finance initiatives (PFIs) in IT in the public sector. After numerous breakdowns and delays, ministers are, it seems, ready to pull the plug.
A Treasury review of PFIs in technology concentrated on the wider reasons why they failed rather than detailing all the PFI projects that have gone badly wrong. But Public Finance obligingly helps out by listing some of the numerous PFI failures, including the fiasco at the Passport Office three years ago, when 400,000 passports were lost in production; the £240 million Libra project designed to share records between magistrates’ courts, still not working after four years; and the continuing problems at the Criminal Records Bureau.
PFIs fail for different reasons but commonly they are unable to cope with changes in specification. Defining IT requirements is also difficult compared, say, with knowing what a new hospital should provide.
So if PFI technology projects are on the way out, what will replace them? A return to in-house IT specialists? Traditional contracting? Public-private partnerships? Treasury officials will decide during the coming months. Public Finance says that although PFI may have been put out of its misery, “the threat of IT catastrophe has not gone with it”.