The Conservative-Liberal coalition is busy cutting budgets, but somehow the CPS managed to a sum in excess of 370,000 of your English pounds to spend on its website. In five years. That's design, creation, maintenance and hosting.
That's just the wedge that went to the IT peeps. Doesn't include the money spent / wasted on internal staff coming up with "user-targeted content" or whatever they call 'copy' these days.
Now, quality design is not cheap, and I'm not one of those idiots who thinks that any old idiot can design a website. It contains a lot of information, it's OK to use, and I do use it regularly (charging standards and that).
But 370k? Worse, they won't say who tendered for the project. The Guardian helpfully chipped in with a FoI Act request, in which my employer kindly pointed out that they carried out a tendering exercise for a 3-year, £45,000 project.
Quite how that became a 5-year, £370,036.35 project is a little beyond me, but then I'm just a hack lawyer -- what would I know?
I recommend the full story, which can be found over at the Guardian.
But it's all OK, because we're about to 'name and shame' those who earn more than 55 grand a year. Which will include every Crown Advocate in the country. Fiddling while Rome burns, perhaps?
DECLARATION OF INTEREST -- I will not be appearing on the list. In an entirely objective and not at all bitter way, I will be examining it closely, however. I shall report any interesting findings here. Don't hold your breath.
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Hello,hello,
ReplyDeleteYes, bullshit seems to pervade the universe. Whilst Rome is burning ( that is not enough bodies to do the work, not enough books etc) money is spent on pet projects. Across the Whitehall the same is happening. If the government concentrated on just doing the job and not the bullshit they would be half way to making a dint in the budget mess.
I have a friend who builds and arranges the hosting of web sites for a living. I'm sure that he has never been paid anything like that for a web site and would have loved to get the chance to quote for the site!
ReplyDeleteThe firm I work for and one I am involved in setting up have both jointly had their websites re-written and written respectively.
ReplyDeleteThe total cost for both sites was under £4K.
The CPS website is pretty good and I for one am very grateful for it, that is a silly amount of money to be spending on a site... especially since the content doesn't really change that often or that much.