IT helps slash £4.7bn off public spending

IT has helped deliver £4.7bn of efficiency savings across the public sector during 2005, according to the Chancellor Gordon Brown's pre-Budget report this week.

Brown claims the savings exceed this year's efficiency targets set by the Gershon Review, which has tasked the public sector with slashing £21bn off annual spending by 2008.

Some of the biggest savings made in 2005 come from the Department of Work and Pension's renegotiated IT deal with EDS, which cut the DWP's spend on the contract by £180m per year to £520m.

Another IT project cited by Brown is a new Probation Service computer system that will automate the preparation of court reports and save 110,000 hours of probation officer time each year.

The NHS' back-office joint-venture with Xansa is also set to deliver annual savings of £15m, while the Department for Transport is now saving more than £350,000 per year through the online booking of driving tests.

But the Chancellor's report coincides with criticism from parliamentary watchdog the Public Accounts Committee of wasted public spending, which says government departments are failing to learn the lessons of a decade of high-profile public sector IT failures.