4.41 The Government is committed to improving the delivery of IT projects it procures to implement public services. The use of PFI in IT has been one method employed to achieve this. In particular, one objective was to introduce third-party finance into IT projects to effect risk transfer, impose further commercial discipline and ensure risk mitigation in the delivery of IT contracts.
4.42 HM Treasury along with Partnerships UK have recently reviewed the operation and performance of PFI in IT to determine how far PFI has been successful in achieving an appropriate sharing of risk in IT and so improved public service delivery. It also sought to investigate important differences between PFI in IT and PFI in other sectors. The evidence collected suggested that, in the majority of successful IT procurements, contracts were renegotiated to move away from the mainstream PFI model based around specified outputs, to adopt a different approach.