§ Mr. Nigel JonesTo ask the Secretary of State for Defence (1) if he will make a statement on the advantages and disadvantages of privatising IT infrastructure in his Department; [168386]
(2) what assessment he has made of the effect of privatisation of IT infrastructure in his Department on national security. [168385]
§ Mr. IngramThese questions have been answered with respect to the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) programme. The Ministry of Defence is currently in negotiations with two potential commercial Delivery Partners (DP) for the provision of information systems services for Ministry of Defence.
It should be noted that the DII programme is not a privatisation of IT infrastructure. Under the terms of the Public-Private Partnership arrangement, the MOD will continue to own the infrastructure but the delivery of the service will be the responsibility of the commercial Delivery Partner.
The DII programme is crucial to the delivery of the Defence Change Programme and has the potential to support delivery of significant benefits across Defence. The DII programme will enable Defence to realise a greatly increased capability at reduced cost. The three main benefits of DII are:
the reduced cost of providing computing facilities due to the economy of scale;1450Wthe ability to put in place pan defence corporate processes that improve the way Defence conducts its business on a day-to-day basis; andthe ability to integrate more closely our battlefield systems with our support systems, leading to improved decision making and intelligence collection and analysis.No disadvantages to the implementation of the DII programme have been identified.
The DII programme will not increase threats to national security. Deployed operations will continue to be supported by Service personnel. Increment One of the programme currently consists of 72,000 workstations. Only 10,000 of these are currently supported by in-house staff. The remainder are already supported by commercial service providers.
As a key part of providing a Network Enabled Capability, DII will improve national security both on deployed operations and in the United Kingdom. As a pan-defence service, it will greatly improve the ability to exchange operational information within the MOD, between the three Services, and between fixed locations and deployed elements of the Services.