A damning report by a committee of UK MPs has found that government departments have been ripped off by a "cartel" of large IT firms. Some government departments were paying as much as 10 times the commercial rate for equipment and up to £3,500 for a single desktop PC.

The public administration committee said an "obscene amount of public money" was being wasted on IT. The government said it was already making "significant improvements" to the way it bought computer equipment. In its report, the public administration committee recommends that departments across Whitehall use more small and medium-sized IT suppliers to increase competition and bring down prices.

“We have a range of highly credible medium sized firms with long established track records who are more than capable of providing IT services with far better value for the tax payer than the large firms highlighted in today’s report,” the committee said.

Basically all the projects were put through by the previous government which awarded them to its chums. Now a committee of MPs of a new government wants to give contracts to its chums instead. So far the UK government's knee jerk reaction has included a refusal to upgrade all versions of IE6 or move to open source. This suggests that the new team are even less clued up than the old ones.