Leader: £400m extra for government spy centre?

The revelation today by MPs that the government's GCHQ spy centre underestimated the IT transition costs of moving to a new building by £400m – yes, you read that right, £400m – is shocking for a number of reasons.

Most importantly, the report reveals a litany of errors for which no one has ultimately been held accountable and for which the taxpayer yet again must foot the bill.

Back in 1997, GCHQ decided to split the private finance initiative contract for the move and handle the IT transition itself because of the sensitive and secret nature of its systems. Estimates at the time put that cost at £41m, although the report says GCHQ bosses were told it would only actually be £20m. In an amazingly cavalier act with public money, bosses did not question this £20m figure because they knew it was actually supposed to be £41m.

Alarm bells should have started ringing then but they didn't. It wasn't until Y2K work started that the penny dropped inside GCHQ and bosses realised their systems were actually quite complex and needed some upgrading. A revised estimate was sent back to the Treasury saying it needed not £41m but - get this - £450m.

The Treasury quite rightly told GCHQ where to go, although it still stumped up an extra £216m. The new HQ is now operational but the IT transition has been broken up into smaller pieces and one old site will have to be kept running until 2012 at an additional cost of £43m.

This entire episode is a sorry tale of failed IT planning, bad management and a complete lack of understanding of the organisation's own IT systems. But once again, apart from a public report where MPs point fingers and individual departments hold up their hands, it appears no one is actually held accountable.

An error of this magnitude wouldn't happen in the private sector. If it did, you can bet someone would go down over it. And it shouldn't happen in the public sector, especially when it is the hard-working taxpayer who ends up paying for the mistakes.

Of course, the best way to stop this is to have better procedures in place during the planning and procurement of the contract – and to this extent the government has put some checks in place – but when things do go wrong on this scale there needs to be more accountability.