Is the Met Police's £216m 10-year contract with SSCL going to be the next government IT disaster?

A lengthy multi-million pound outsourcing contract in government - what could go wrong?

The Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, Stephen Greenhaigh, has approved a mega £216m 10-year deal with private firm Shared Services Connected Limited (SSCL), to outsource three of the Metropolitan Police Service's back-office departments.

According to the Metropolitan Police, the deal will generate savings in excess of £100m over the period of the contract.

The contract will see more than 400 posts transferred to SSCL - the shared services joint venture between Sopra Steria and the Cabinet Office - but it is likely that some of the existing employees will be made redundant, and indeed, estimated costs of redundancies have been taken into account as part of the £216m figure. SSCL has a history of making redunancies within 12 months of a long-term contract.

In July, a Met Police spokesperson said that the organisation had explored the benefits of keeping services in-house as well as outsourcing them to a new supplier or suppliers. The spokesperson added that its existing in-house business support services could not make the changes required in order to match the financial and performance benefits of a market solution.

According to the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), services will be managed as they are for the first year of the new contract, as SSCL configures a new IT platform to replace the existing solutions. Services will then be transferred to SSCL from October 2016 onwards.

Despite the fact that the Met Police has claimed that it has completed a thorough analysis of the options it had available, the deal it has struck goes against what many in government have been preaching in recent years; as GDS said in 2013, it wanted government to have the ability "to go for short, flexible contracts, and make sure that technology choices don't lock us in as our needs and organisations change".

A 10-year deal with SSCL doesn't exactly provide this - and it bears much resemblance to past IT catastrophes in the public sector, which Computing documented last week, the worst of which was the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

Indeed, if for whatever reason things don't work out between the Met Police and SSCL, it will have difficulty in cancelling any contracts, as the Department of Health found out with NPfIT.

Many had thought that with a slew of major outsourcing contracts reaching their conclusion, the Met Police would have acted differently. As government CTO Liam Maxwell said last year, the aim was to blow open the oligopoly of public-sector IT, dominated by the major outsourcers, and to inject both competition and new idea from the SMB sector.

But what does selecting SSCL mean?

The question remains whether SSCL always has an edge when competing with other companies for contracts, as it is 25 per cent owned by the Cabinet Office. It is unknown whether the Met considered other solutions such as Multi Force Shared Services (MFSS) or whether, as it seems, it just took the fast-track option to outsourcing.

Either way, perhaps it was the most cost-effective deal and will yield major savings, but the 10-year contract period - not to mention the £216m figure - will have many wondering whether it could all lead to yet another case of the government wasting millions of pounds on a sub-par project.