UK Government website spending
July 10th, 2010 by Michael Christian
Hearing about how our government spending tax payer money are juicy topics to share. I was staggered after reading this article from BBC after recent stories about government website spending and iPhone apps, and I thought I would share it for the fun reading.
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk £105m for 3 years with only around one million unique visitor a month
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk £35m a year
http://www.nhs.uk £21m a year with six million unique visitor a month
Interesting stuff, but it’s even more interesting when you look at the break-down:
- Strategy and Planning: £6.2m
- Design and Build: £4.4m
- Hosting and Infrastructure: £4.7m
- Content Provision: £15.3m
- Testing and Evaluation: £4.5m
You might ask yourself the following:
Is it typical to spend more on Strategy than on Design and Build?
More than likely these strategists will be 3rd party consultants with obscene hourly rates.
Why does Testing and Evaluation cost more than Design and Build?
If your development team are technically competent and stick to defined standards a significant amount of bugs should get squashed in surface testing.
To me it looks like a very typical public sector project with too much emphasis on strategy and high-level consultation instead of focusing on delivering the project.
I just want to cry whenever you see this kind of shocking waste of public money. How can even the public sector justify £4.4 million on designing and building a website.
This is as I understand it a 3 year project. If each designer was paid £25k a year – a reasonable average – that means designing and building this completely dreadful site occupied 58 full time web designers and content generators.
Claromentis would be embarrassed to quote £20k for such a dreadful, ugly, useless site.
Just sickening. Fire them all.