UK government sets “red lines” on wasteful IT contracts

While working on FSFE’s response to the UK government’s consultation on using Open Standards by default for government documents, I noticed something that I had apparently overlooked during the busy days ahead of FOSDEM. On Jan 24, the UK government published a few principles for future government IT contracts.
They’re quite clear, quite brief, and quite powerful:

  •     no IT contract will be allowed over £100 million in value –  unless there is an exceptional reason to do so, smaller contracts mean competition from the widest possible range of suppliers
  •     companies with a contract for service provision will not be allowed to provide system integration in the same part of government
  •     there will be no automatic contract extensions; the government won’t extend existing contracts unless there is a compelling case
  •     new hosting contracts will not last for more than 2 years

Regarding the first one: 100 million GBP may seem quite a lot. OTOH, the UK government apparently has several IT contracts worth
over a billion pounds each, so this is a significant improvement.

If other governments – and especially the European Commission – followed this approach, that would mean a lot of progress.