If you suspected British government IT contracts were a mess, a parliamentary report has just confirmed your worst fears.

The Public Administration Committee has investigated how government buys IT, and decided it's "a recipe for rip-offs". To put it bluntly, the evidence they took revealed public sector IT as a scene of prehistoric horror.

The Committee's report identifies numerous serious problems, including over-specification, supplier lock-in, bad project management, overcharging, and the commissioning of vast and complex projects that are redundant by the time they're released.

One particular problem for small businesses is the way they get locked out of bidding for contracts. That's partly because it's easier for the government to speak to only a few large suppliers, but it's also a result of the "convoluted" tendering process, of criteria that are impossibly high for many SMEs, and of the tendency for large providers who claim they're going to sub-contract to fire their sub-contractors at the beginning or in the middle of the contract.
Government efforts to tackle the problem

Is it possible to change all this and get small businesses involved in more public sector contracts?

Yes and no. The government has announced a substantial list of measures by which it hopes to transform the process. But the public sector pie is getting smaller.
Among the reforms already launched or being proposed are a contracts finder website for jobs worth over £10,000.

The government would like to eliminate the infamous PQQ (pre-qualification questionnaire) for contracts worth under £100,000. They are seeking to make bidding and performance a lot more transparent. And they've proposed product surgeries, which will allow businesses to pitch ideas for innovative services.

But public spending is going to shrink and small businesses will be battling for pieces of a smaller pie. The big providers have already had to renegotiate contracts downwards, and this will have a knock-on effect on their smaller sub-contractors.

So a broad and safe prediction is that lower spending will be distributed more fairly. But it will still pay to be a big contractor because the overheads of bidding will be lower as a proportion of your income, you already know the right people, and you have a track record of implementation.

Even if, as the report says, that track record has helped turn the UK into "a world leader in ineffective IT schemes for government".