In promising to “leave no stone unturned” in the search for efficiency savings, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has revealed the latest figures for cutting public sector IT spending.

Maude claims to have saved the public purse £402m this financial year by scrapping the controversial national identity scheme. He expects to save a further £800m by renegotiating contracts with major suppliers – many of whom are IT suppliers.

“Every pound wasted unnecessarily in Whitehall on operational overheads is a pound that can’t be spent on the services we all rely on,” Maude said in a statement.

These cost savings – potentially topping £1.2bn – address the notion that the government’s procurement of IT has been hamfisted and delivered poor value for money.

But stopping or cutting back projects does nothing to address the concern that the real problem with public sector IT is that billions have been spent, without delivering improvements in efficiency. As part of the effort to address that, Maude has promised to focus on delivering web-enabled public services.

“In an age when 96 per cent of all 25 to 34-years-olds are internet users, just 13 per cent of our contact with citizens is currently carried out online. We have to start looking at ways we can improve the way we communicate with citizens. But we also need to do it in a more cost-effective way than has been tried before,” he added.

Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2271825/government-save-2bn