Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to the Answer of 4 April 2022 to Question 148116 on Treasury: Procurement, what element of the contract HMT OSCAR II Procurement, published by his Department on 24 April 2019, gave rise to the dispute for which a £0.9 million settlement was paid by his Department; and in which month of 2020-21 that payment was made.

Schedule 4, Part B, 2.1 of the HMT OSCAR II Procurement contract gave rise to the dispute for which a £0.9 million settlement was agreed. Specifically, “The Customer shall use its reasonable endeavours to provide to the Supplier all data for the purposes of migration in the agreed format (inc. quality, format, cleansing and mapping of data).”

Issues arose for HMT in extracting the necessary data from the legacy system OSCAR II is replacing. This caused delays that consequently caused additional costs for the supplier.

It was agreed that payment of the £0.9 million would be paid in stages. Payments have been made in March 2021, March 2022 and 15% is due this financial year – likely September 2022.