Originally Posted by OLD BOY

There must be a reason why this has gone so badly wrong. The government put up the money and agreed the project, but it’s the civil servants whose responsibility it is to get the specification for the contract right and to set performance measures, and it is also their job to ensure those performance measures (which will include monitoring costs and the progress of the project) are met. This is what appears to have gone badly wrong.

Clearly, if the government changes requirements during the rollout of the project, any additional costs associated with that will be down to them, but those additional costs should be picked up and factored in. The shambles that we are seeing here are replicated in all the contract specifications and performance monitoring in the privatised industries. We should be employing people who actually understand what the hell they are doing when it comes to contract management.