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To reiterate my comment at TFA, that they're no doubt going to approve.

I would like to know how you arrived at your headline - £32000/day for the Birmingham City Council website?

Your quote "To date we've invested £48.4m ..." from http://www.capita.co.uk/about-us/Pages/Birmingham.aspx gives a figure spent by Service Birmingham (£48.4 million), and that page states SB were "established in April 2006 to provide the Council’s information and communications
technology (ICT) services". That's 1596 days ago assuming 2006-4-30 to 2010-9-12. Dividing one by the other gives £30325/day, I presume you performed a similar division to reach £32000/day. However I cannot see how you conclude that the £48.4 million was spent entirely on the BCC website, and hence justify your headline.

To declare my interests I worked at Service Birmingham - the Capita/Birmingham City Council joint venture - until Jan 2010. Except for about 5 days as a testing volunteer I did not work on the CMS for birmingham.gov.uk. I have no financial interest in SB or Capita, but I do pay council tax to BCC. I await your answer.

Sincerely, Alex Willmer

The summary is disingenuous: the cost is for their IT, not just a single HTML website.

Could be:
http://www.capita.co.uk/about-us/Pages/Birmingham.aspx

Service Birmingham is our joint venture with Birmingham City Council, Europe's largest local authority, established in April 2006 to provide the Council's information and communications technology (ICT) services. Substantial investment and innovation have created an all-new platform that underpins the Council's ambitious business transformation programme. To date we've invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software - and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation.

The cost of the site itself was covered a few months back - excellent reporting from Heather Brooke and friends:
http://podnosh.com/blog/2010/05/27/the-report-on-birmingham-gov-uk-is-published/
http://helpmeinvestigate.com/investigations/49-when-can-we-expect-a-new-birmingham-gov-website

Anyone know of any large outsourcing company that deliver what they promised, to a decent quality?

Capita are another company that comes to mind. They have ripped off most public services in the UK with their poor products. Capita did a good job at ripping Birmingham City Council off with their new web site.

You're right about the BBC's tactics. It seems from their behaviour over the past couple of years that they want to charge everyone who has access to the internet. The annual tax (it has been so defined by the government) is about $270. However, collection of this tax has been outsourced to Capita plc, http://www.capita.co.uk/. They are not very good at it, and depend on propaganda put out by the BBC about electronic detection of TV sets in use. Evidence from "detectors" has never been used in court, and the technology behind them is deeply suspect. There is a growing resistance in the UK to the tax; the BBC is effectively the state broadcaster and is seen by many as manipulating the news to present the government in a favourable light. To learn more, go to http://bbctvlicence.com/.

"Bugging" you is not the same as making you pay though is it. They HAVE to enfoce the licence fee, its their bread and butter after all.

Also, collection issues are really the fault of Capita so really its them who need their arses kicked.

http://www.capita.co.uk/

(logo with strapline "Your Professional Support Services Resource")

"This website is currently undergoing essential maintenance.

Please call back later."

They only need to make the source available if they distribute the binary. If it was kept for internal use, they wouldn't have to make anything available to anyone.

Right?

But there's really no downside for them to allow distribution of their custom code, as long as someone else pays for the bandwidth. In fact, the wider testing/scrutiny of the code would be a plus.

Can you imagine if all governments started doing things like this? The rate of useful development for open source software would skyrocket. Not only would it let more coders work on projects full time, but maybe a tighter focus and clear specs would improve the usability of the resulting software. And even if, say, the Ruritanian government's groupware project failed, the successful Armenian groupware project would step up to fill the gap.

It amazes me that, in my country, individual local councils hire incompetent companies to screw up important services like benefit distribution when they should be clubbing together to develop a GPL'd local government suite. Sure, you wouldn't get widespread use of such software by a big pool of users, but it still makes sense to have 50 councils funding something they can all use rather than each one getting a bespoke solution. I suppose they each have different legacy tardware, but even so...

<Sigh.> What was my point again?