£500m government IT contracts awarded

The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) has replaced its existing IT suppliers with two new contracts worth an estimated £500m as part of plans to create a single, common IT platform across the department.

Atos Origin and LogicaCMG have been awarded the two seven-year application and infrastructure contracts following a two-year competitive development, innovation and support contracts (Disc) procurement programme.

EDS and IBM were both shortlisted for the new contracts but failed to win.

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The two contracts will replace existing deals with EDS for crown and county courts' IT systems; Liberata for accounting, financial, HR/payroll and management information services; Accenture, Fujitsu and STL on the Libra programme to replace magistrates' courts' IT systems; and Cable & Wireless for web hosting when they expire during 2007 and 2008.

Atos Origin won the infrastructure contract and will be responsible for the rollout of a single, common IT infrastructure across the whole department, covering 28,000 PCs in 700 locations. LogicaCMG won the applications contract and will provide support, maintenance and development of existing applications.

DCA permanent secretary Alex Allan said the new contracts offer greater value for money to the taxpayer and will allow the department to better exploit technology to improve services.