Mega-contract just got even more costly

Few, however, would have expected it to be before the ink was even dry on the deal.

The 2021 Budget tells us however, that, thanks to a number of smaller contracts being inadvertently left off the main agreement, the States underestimated how much it would need to pay the IT contractor this year and next.

The extra payments total the best part of a million pounds, boosted by items being added to the contract at an incorrect value and a failure to factor in inflation.

As part of a £200m. decade-long deal it might not seem like much, but islanders were told that this was the States at its most rigorous.

What happens when they are sloppy?

Policy & Resources’ lead on the project, Deputy Jon Le Tocq, informed deputies back in June 2019 that a senior commercial lawyer on the States payroll had worked full-time on the project to ensure they got it right. ‘I do not think we could have done much more…’

‘We have never taken so long and been so thorough in ensuring that we try and achieve what we want and that those who are tendering for these services are properly scrutinised,’ he said.

Indeed, the two UK tenderers shortlisted reassured him that the degree and depth of the scrutiny they faced was ‘unprecedented’.

This was a huge and difficult project. Deputy Le Tocq’s former boss, Gavin St Pier, said it was the most thorough and complex procurement process in his seven years in the States.

Yet he had confidence in where two years’ hard work had got them.

Weary islanders can be confident of only one thing: no one will ever hold their hand up and take responsibility for the missing million. It is not the States’ way.

The drivers behind the project remain even more valid today than they were at its inception: the States needs a technological revolution.

But at a time when the island has a massive hole in its bucket, it can do without expensive errors.