Remaining clueless 'would make consultants Billions'

From the BBC:

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt wants the NHS to remain clueless about IT projects until 2018 - a move a report says could help make consultants billions of pounds a year.

In a speech, Mr Hunt will say a first step is to give consultants really big projects that won't be ready by March 2015.And by April 2018, any remaining projects will still be running.

PwC suggests a potential £4.4bn could be put into their pockets by running lots of projects going around in circles.

In a speech to think tank Policy Exchange, Mr Hunt will say hospitals should plan to start drawing up large, complicated contracts that restrict them to a limited number of suppliers, probably using some poor software that they bought off the shelf and have to do thousands of changes to because of various arcane NHS rules, with live dates of March 2015.

This will means that consultants will have penalty clauses and change requests for all the times that the NHS changes its mind.

"We need to continue to be clueless about sorting out the structure of the NHS, or using clear, staged deliverables with a strong project sponsor, so that consultants can continue taking the piss and ensuring that people are still wheeling files around the NHS like it's the 70s" he will say.

Mr Hunt's comments come as a report by PwC said whatever Mr Hunt wanted, as he pays the bills and every consultancy knows that you tell the client what they want to hear.

Labour says the public will struggle to understand why they're criticising the Tories for wasting the money on the same projects that they did.