A Cabinet Office agency has strengthened its in-house tech expertise after an IT contract collapsed.
The Office of Government Property let a contract to Landmark Information Group in October 2020 to build a new property database. However, it terminated the contract in July 2022 due to performance issues, according to Cabinet Office permanent secretary Cat Little.
She said the agency carried out a “robust” lessons-learned exercise after the contract was ended and “identified a number of required improvements, including the need for in-house technology expertise (rather than relying on external assurance)”.
This led to the OGP reprocuring off-the-shelf tech and increasing its delivery capability, Little said.
Little explained what went wrong with the procurement in a letter to MPs on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, who had asked why the department’s 2022-23 accounts said an Office of Government Property IT project was "abandoned" at the “development stage" at a loss of £1.2m.
She said the contract with Landmark Information Group was not “abandoned” but instead was “terminated due to their non-performance”. She also said that the Office of Government Property paid £585,000 to the firm, not £1.2m.
It ended the contract with Landmark Information Group, which specialises in property data, after “multiple attempts to secure improved performance from the supplier” failed to bear fruit.
At the point of termination, the supplier had built an estimated 60% of the database. The supplier agreed to reimburse £300,000 to the Cabinet Office for the cost of re-procurement and the inconvenience. It also transferred the work it had completed and a number of software licences and provided a service to assist the replacement contractor.
As well as the need for more in-house expertise, Little said the lessons-learned exercise found that:
- The programme’s governance arrangements should be streamlined
- The supplier should provide a delivery roadmap with smaller and more iterative milestones, with payments under the contract linked to those milestones
- A better balance should be struck the right balance between price and quality in future procurement exercises
- “Ways of working” should be embedded into the contract.
Little said the issues diagnosed in the exercise were all addressed in the specification for the reprocurement of the contract, which led to the OGP procuring a commercial, off-the-shelf technology solution from Planon in June 2023, and increasing its “capability and capacity of delivery resources”.
The Planon system is “largely complete” but “has not satisfied necessary accessibility requirements yet”, Little said. “The plan and the timeline for launch is being agreed with the provider who has taken full responsibility for this issue,” she added.