Oh dear, presumably thinking that they are now safe from contradiction, the Inside Outers are up to their old tricks - spinning the facts in a way that fits their story rather than telling the truth.They are fully aware that the e-government programme did not cost £90 million and that it is much more than mainframe renewal. After all it was their programme. The Administration just scaled it back to make it more affordable and deliverable.
The value of the phase one contract is £83 million over 10 years. The majority of this cost is to run the Council’s ICT Service which was transferred to Capgemini when the contract was signed. Included in that sum is £18 million, which is the cost of the new ICT system. In addition to the cost of the contract the Council will incur costs of £15 million over the 10 years, which is mainly how much the Council needs to pay to manage the programme and the outsourced ICT contract. Therefore the total value of the project is £98 million over 10 years.
The programme will be funded from a combination of the existing ICT budget totalling £53 million over ten years, new investment of £3.7 million a year and savings of £8.5 million over the period of the contract. The council has already identified half of those savings before the first year has concluded.
Labour and the Inside Outers are very fond of using the word 'incompetence'. We would suggest that the main reason for that is that they are so intimate with the concept. It was their mishandling of e-government that led to a strike and pie-in-the-sky arithmetic that we had to bring back down to earth.
It was their incompetence that led to the closure of the Leisure Centre and a bill for maintenance across the Council's property portfolio that runs into tens of millions of pounds. There is a whole catalogue of similar charges that Labour have to answer before they can go shouting the odds about others. We are sure that future posts will elucidate further.
