- Smart Healthcare, Friday 20 November 2009 16.16 GMT
The campaign group has placed NPfIT at the top of a list of overspending government projects, ahead of the Olympics.
It claimed that the programme's original cost was £2.3bn and that the latest estimate is £12.7bn, producing a cost overrun of £10.4bn. This compares with a £6.9bn overrun against an original estimate of £2.4bn for the 2012 London Olympics.
The Department of Health responded that the figures were not comparable. "The original estimated cost quoted by the TaxPayers' Alliance was the amount for the first three years. It was the original allocation in the Comprehensive Spending Review of 2002," said a spokesperson.
But the higher cost, quoted by the National Audit Office in 2007, is for the whole project through to 2014-15. "So it's comparing apples with pears," said the spokesperson.
John O'Connell, policy analyst at the TaxPayers' Alliance, replied: "The initial cost had no mention of it being a three year cost. They had no mention of a complete cost at all." This demonstrates poor planning and management, he added.
The department also said that the actual spending on NPfIT to March this year was only £4.5bn, as suppliers are paid only when systems are delivered. O'Connell said that his research used the available estimates of total costs on completion.
The research highlighted other notorious government IT projects, including the courts' Libra system (£341m over its original £146m budget) and the prison IT Nomis project (£279m above the £234m original estimate). It also listed several Department for Work and Pensions projects.
"The Alliance makes some sensible points about the perverse incentives within government to optimism over the cost of major capital projects, but their analysis only makes it more clear that IT programmes should not be assessed in this way," said Stephen Roberts, principal analyst at Kable.
"Major IT projects, rather than being treated in the same way as built infrastructure investments, should be treated as ongoing cost aspects of major change programmes and judged on their contribution to output and efficiency."
