HC Deb 19 July 2002 vol 389 c612W
Mr. Bercow

To ask the Solicitor-General what estimate she has made of the total savings to public funds of the Private Finance Initiative contract for the Docman IT project for the Serious Fraud Office by comparison with a non-Private Finance Initiative alternative. [49668]

The Solicitor-General

[holding answer 17 April 2002]: The original contract, which covered the Docman project as well as the provision of internal IT services was signed in January 1998.

The reasons for taking the PFI route were:

The size of the task was too great for the SFO to manage in house; The main task was the creation of an on-line document management system and this represented a major item of software which was to be written by suppliers; The contract transferred the majority of the project risk to the suppliers; The contract included a significant element of service, which permitted the suppliers to be paid in terms of the number of cases using the completed system.

The whole project represented value for money. It is not practical to quantify the savings, which would have been made from adopting the PFI route as opposed to a non PFI route as the Docman project did not proceed on the lines planned. The contract was amended in September 2000 to exclude the Docman project. This is now being carried forward separately on a non-PFI basis. The first case went live on the Docman system in June 2002.