Case studies

We frequently see government failing to recognise interdependencies or meet its obligations, with a range of negative results, for example:

•  Extra costs and delay. The Ministry of Defence contracted a supplier to recruit enough suitable personnel for its Army 2020 (2014 report) structure. The supplier's performance, agreed in its contract, depended on the Department providing supporting ICT infrastructure for their new recruitment software by an agreed date. The Department did not provide this infrastructure which meant the supplier could not run the recruitment process as planned. It had to fund extra costs to support manual workarounds, which were likely to total some £25 million. The Home Office's E-borders (2015 report) supplier carried out initial design before designers were fully aware of the Department's detailed requirements. Disputes arose because the supplier did not believe the Department had rights to change requirements after contract award, and this resulted in programme delays.

•  Understanding and challenging supplier performance. Our 2015 report on military flying training found that the Ministry of Defence had difficulty holding the supplier to account for its performance partly because it was required to provide instructors itself. Because of issues with its own performance, the Department deducted little from payments because of its supplier failing to meet its responsibilities despite considering performance to have been poor.

•  Failing to transfer risk as planned. Our 2010 report on PFI hospitals found that hospital trusts had difficulty meeting their obligations to allow suppliers to manage maintenance. This was because they needed to vacate hospital wards for maintenance to be carried out. Because they did not always allow scheduled maintenance, trusts found themselves accepting the maintenance risk, despite having paid for the risk to be transferred.

•  Complexity. The Cabinet Office's shared service centres (2016 report) programme relied on the different customer departments and organisations agreeing the specification of new software. Reaching an agreement took longer than expected which led to significant delays. Suppliers argued that government was responsible for some of the extra costs. Government and suppliers are in the process of renegotiating the contracts.

•  Failing to achieve benefits. For planned benefits from the new emergency services network (2016 report) contract to be realised, major business change by the emergency services is needed. Supporting the achievement of these benefits is not part of the programme's scope and it was not clear who should take responsibility for changing behaviour. Without a co-ordinated approach to add value, we found that the programme's benefits would likely be reduced.