§ Mr. HawkinsTo ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department, what the costs of her Department's Libra project are(a) as originally estimated and (b) as currently planned. (97711)
§ Yvette CooperThe costs of the Libra project are set out in the National Audit Office's report: "New IT systems for Magistrates Courts: The Libra project" published on 29 January 2003 as ISBN:0102920362. Officials gave evidence on this report to the Public Accounts Committee on 10 February 2003.
The headline costs are published in the report and show the original total project cost as at December 1998 to be £194 million. The fully delivered project is expected to cost £390 million. This £390 million breaks down as:
98WContract costs: £318 million (£232 million for the infrastructure contract with Fujitsu Services and an estimated £86 million for the two separate contracts for core application services and system integration.Internal project costs: £12 millionAdditional costs: £60 million (required for staff, legal and procurement advisers, costs for migration, extended legacy system costs and other enhancements to the infrastructure service which are yet to be contracted for)The project cost at December 1998 cannot be directly compared with the current proposal; since December 1998 the contracts underpinning the project have been subject to a number of changes in costs, timescales and scope, and these are described in the NAO Report. The project's current costs have been subject to independent, external, benchmark assessments providing assurance that they are in-line with other comparable projects in the public sector and private industry.