And the sanctions for the mass of council employees and politicos who approved this mess from day one... ?

Meanwhile a rich man sits on one of his yachts urinating himself (not through senility) with laughter at this copper bottom incompetence and clown show that keeps on going.

It would have been cheaper to return to paper, pen and filing cabinet. Maybe harder for fraud too...

Yeah, you would have thought "payment on completion" to concentrate their minds and not have this endless shitshow.

Ten million. That's how many teaching assistants?

The problem was the definition of "completion" kept on changing, hence why the council had to keep handing over bundles of cash to Oracle.

You might imagine that both customer and supplier would have audit functions on the check list. Even if the council are daft, the supplier might want to nudge them

That would require either a public enquiry on the scale of the postmasters, or a police 'operation' lasting half a decade or so.

Around May 2026 could well be the date that the residents get to provide their own sanction.

It will be an interesting election!

Depending on your point of view - money pit or cash cow.

Throwing good money after bad money (*) ? Or, the glass is half full, half empty (**) ?

(*) The perception of good and bad is determined by whether you are on the receiving end or a spectator.

(**) Either way, the glass was not manufactured to the correct specifications.

I always prefer glass half empty. The reasoning is that if it's half empty it has been full and I've already drunk half of it and once I've drunk the other half it might get refilled. OTOH half full might be as good as it's going to get.

It’s not just the Brummies who are being taken for a ride. See the Rotten Boroughs current Pre-Election Special issue of Private Eye for the same malarky in West Sussex.

What do other UK councils do? They all exist in the same legal environment with the same job to do for their residents, so presumably there is at least one existing, working, solution already out there.

Separate, but related, thought: Why in heaven's name is there not a standard solution that any and every council in England and Wales can't just adopt?

Maybe the bus taking the decision makers to another "fact finding" trip, in the cold of a British winter, didn't have enough room.

Or a fact finding mission to Slough (or similar) is just not so attractive?

Just like if a lobbyist offers you a working meeting at some uber-Michelin restaurant and, oh as it is a long way away maybe you must stay over for a "presentation" versus a quick lunch at your local burger joint...

(for those who the usual rules don't apply to).

" Why in heaven's name is there not a standard solution that any and every council in England and Wales can't just adopt? "

Because the posh people in Surrey can't abide to know that they have the same needs as Dave. A 30-something part time labourer who lives in a council flat in Birmingham.

Then you have the councils who think they couldn't possibly be doing the same job or have the same needs as any other council in the country.

"Why in heaven's name is there not a standard solution that any and every council in England and Wales can't just adopt?"

Because it's more profitable to pick them off one at a time.

Getting together to commission a development of a common system would probably be outside their remit and possibly, in consequence, illegal. I wonder if getting together to develop a common, properly tested specification would be OK Probably not feasible as councils of different political persuations would spend their time falling out with each other.

> ...presumably there is at least one existing, working, solution ...

Have you ever had any dealings with a UK council (other than paying tax to them)? I suspect not.

There is a solution built for councils, the Australian company technology one has an ERP OneCouncil solution, it works, it's not cheap, but it's a lot cheaper than the others out there.

With regard to other services (i.e. not ERP, (planning, housing, benefits, elections, etc)) the big firms are already in to deep with massive data extraction fees and the threat of de-supporting should you connect to the database directly (that's if you can even work out the schema after 20+ years of badly managed mergers) there is not really any option but to keep using them... Boooo!

I've heard of another UK public body trying to do an Oracle implementation and is about to throw it out and start again.

"completely reimplement the software "out-of-the-box"... [this plan] would require significant business change"

I'll say it would require significant change. ERP software is designed to be customised to fit the organisation's existing processes. Asking each council department to change their processes to fit the out-of-the-box install is madness. It sounds like a nice solution until you realise that half of the processes were not planned but forced on them and evolved over years due to annoying reality. I have worked on a large CRM project that management were insistent was to be out-of-the-box, to get it rolled out quick time because essentially all sales departments are the same. That plan lasted until the first users got a look at it and then the project became a bit more 'agile'. I'm sure every council could benefit from reviewing their processes but throwing them all out and starting from scratch with what Oracle thinks is the baseline for all organisations is not a good plan.