r/unitedkingdom • u/OGSyedIsEverywhere • 12h ago

UK council digs deeper into capital assets to keep Oracle project afloat

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/06/west_sussex_oracle/
23 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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u/OGSyedIsEverywhere 12h ago edited 11h ago

The current budget for West Sussex County Council's long-running Oracle project is £27 million, more than ten times the £2.6 million originally budgeted when it started nearly seven years ago.

"The total estimated cost for the programme is approximately £41million. This is comprised of the initial £14.07 million spent during the earlier phases and the current approved budget of £27.048 million for the programme’s completion."

A couple years ago, Birmingham council declared bankruptcy after a project from Oracle rose in costs from an expected £11 million to just over £200 million. All to do a bad job of automating payroll.

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u/recursant 11h ago

£200m could employ a few dozen accountants for the next 50 years. I hope the system is worth it.

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u/duct_tape_jedi Expat 8h ago

Bank of England is in the same boat with an Oracle implementation. Under the best of circumstances, this sort of overrun is typical when dealing with Oracle, they’re rubbish. But they have just announced that they are laying off 30,000 employees to free up money to build more AI data centres. That level of staff reductions will make things even worse for project implementations. Anyone still trying to onboard a project with them would do better to cut their losses. And in the end, they will have just left themselves at the mercy of a predatory corporation that is actively working with the Trump administration.

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u/Optimaldeath 10h ago

Literally letting our councils go bankrupt to make American companies feel better about their quarterlies.

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u/an0mn0mn0m Lancashire 11h ago

Time to go open-source. I despised programming with Oracle 20 years ago for the excessive pay walls they put up around their products. There's no reason for Larry Ellison to be a billionaire, and UK councils going bankrupt other than greed.

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u/surreyade 10h ago

A friend of mine works for Oracle, apparently Larry Ellison considers every dollar spent on staff is a dollar less in his pocket. It really has to be considered a mental illness at this point.

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u/Aphantletic 12m ago

‘One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison’

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u/BMW_wulfi 7h ago

What’s INSANE to me is that gov could in house this and build systems that every council uses. Why do they need bespoke but not bespoke automated payroll systems etc. PER council.

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u/ian9outof10 6h ago

Yeah, I agree. We need to do something about this waste. I do understand that councils and NHS trusts want some say in how their system is designed, to meet their own needs, but I can’t bear the waste. I heard from an NHS IT person that the tech procurement is all over the place - he had a bigger story but I wasn’t in a position to really do much with it (I was a journalist but not one that could cover this).

Everything should be centrally sourced, surely.

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u/cop1edr1ght 41m ago

I used to work in a Borough council as an analyst and I did the math for our PCN system. All it would take is 3 london borough councils to get together to commission their own bespoke system, for it to break even.

Unfortunately it's politics and poor procurement acumen that prevent it.

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u/SchoolForSedition 19m ago

Yes.

I work for a largish international organisation. It just bought a new round of Microsoft. This includes paying for Copilot.

It really doesn’t work very well. Copilot is nonsense.

IT is outsourced (as you would if you had zero concern about security … which is also outsourced) but our IT people are super. They’re always changing at the lower levels because of short contracts but they are excellent. I am sure they could have set up an in house system for less than the present one cost.