Costs for the NHS National Programme for IT continue to escalate

The cost of the NHS's National Programme for IT has risen dramatically. Questions in the House of Commons to the Minister of State for Health Services, Ben Bradshaw, published in Hansard on the 1st of September, appear to reveal that BT will now be paid £1bn for supplying the national data spine for the NPfT, rather than the originally contracted fee of £620m.

Fujitsu withdrew from the programme due to a failure to agree on new contract terms. Fujitsu had been dissatisfied with the terms of its contract and had been seeking higher revenues. BT, already a contractor for other parts of the scheme, stepped in to fill the breach.

The original results-based contracts for this extremely ambitious project were negotiated by the former head of the NHS Connecting for Health, Richard Granger, who left the NHS at the end of last year. Granger was noted for keeping a very tight reign on these budgets. Changes and additions that emerged over the course of the contract prompted all the major contractors to ask for a contract reset.

As the minister noted in his reply to the House the additional fees are for additional work not covered by the original contract. Bradshaw said in his answer to a question from his Conservative shadow, Stephen O'Brien,"Where there are increases in the value of the reset contract when compared to the original contract value, this is due to changes or additional requirements that have been negotiated as part of the reset agreement and these have been approved through normal governance arrangements,".

A Connecting for Health spokesperson, commenting on the increases echoed this response, saying "There are no changes to the cost of delivering the requirements of the original contracts," – "Additional work for new requirements and additional functionality will attract additional costs – as was always part of the contract."

Unfortunately the ambitious scale of the scheme and the continuing problems it encounters, have resulted in diminishing confidence in its successful outcome amongst health care workers.

(Terry Relph-Knight)

(trk)