A written answer in response to Conservative MP Grant Shapps has provided the best breakdown I’ve yet seen of spending on NHS Choices, one of the government’s three £20m mega-portals. You kinda know what’s coming, don’t you?
2007-08 Strategy and planning: £3,291,659.57 Design and build £4,266,748.79 Hosting and infrastructure £1,871,933.81 Content provision £3,010,242.69 Testing and evaluation £1,236,993.29 Total £13,677,578.14 2008-09 Strategy and planning: £8,764,040.54 Design and build £7,470,562.03 Hosting and infrastructure £3,169,335.95 Content provision £7,156,673.03 Testing and evaluation £1,300.208.47 Total £27,860,820.02 2009-10 Strategy and planning: £5,845,541.38 Design and build £6,377,614.00 Hosting and infrastructure £2,610,803.31 Content provision £5,448,688.20 Testing and evaluation £1,023,417.78 Total £21,306,064.66
I’m not sure which figure jumps out at me the most; they’re all eyepoppingly large. It’s probably the £8.76m on strategy and planning in 2008-9 – which, let’s note, doesn’t include the £1.3m on testing and evaluation. And since it’s broken out separately, you have to assume that the costs allocated to the other categories are actual production costs, ie ‘strategy’ not included..?
The easiest to justify is probably ‘content provision’ – although it’s a genuine surprise to see it third on the list of priorities behind ‘design and build’ (of a site that’s already been largely designed and built already?) and ‘strategy and planning’.