A blacklist of public sector IT contractors should be drawn up to identify those whose past pledges of value for money were just spin, a Labour MP is urging.

Speaking to the House of Commons, Austin Mitchell MP declared a need to stop consultancy and IT suppliers targeting the public purse as a source of easy profits.

He explained that, since 1997, such consultancies have “grown fat” off the taxpayer, partly thanks to “impulsive gestures” and “idealistic” thinking by the government.

But the member of the Public Accounts Committee said the other cause was state officials being taken in too easily by the IT sector’s sales and marketing teams.

“All too often, departments seem incapable of dealing with the wily stratagems and sales patter of consultancy salesmen,” the Labour MP for Grimsby said last week.

These salesmen, particularly those at the big IT consultancies, “over-praise” their product or service and “forecast that it can do more than it actually can,” he said.

It is not the first attack on IT’s drive for business by a Labour MP. Targeting EDS for its C-Nomis project, Jack Straw said officials were victim to “snake oil salesmen.”

But Mitchell believes the “failure” is actually on both sides of the contract – on the part of the IT supplier’s sales team and the government body engaging that supplier.

He said: “Departments…try to set too many objectives to be accomplished, which always leads to failure in IT contracts. When we try to do more with an IT system than it can bear, it inevitably breaks down and performs inadequately.”

To evidence his claim, he pointed out that the MoD’s defence information infrastructure programme was running 18 months late, and that the NHS care records system was also behind schedule, by four years.

He believes government departments need better advice to “put them on a more secure and effective platform for controlling the suppliers of IT systems they deal with.”

He added: “No taxpayer pound should be the source of easy profit. That is an absolute maxim. However, in consultancy and IT services, the taxpayer pound has been a source of far-too-easy profits.

“We need to control that, exact penalties where necessary and blacklist firms that are over-selling in that fashion to see that they do not make the same profits and mistakes in future.”

Part of Mitchell’s vision includes giving the Office of Government Commerce a stronger and more effective role than that of an advice service, allowing it to push its choices for IT contracts.

“It should have an audit and control role over those contracts, and it should ensure that performance is adequate,” he said. “If it is not, it should demand sanctions and penalties.”

Contractor UK