EDS, that’s who: who would charge the child benefit people £5000 for a SQL job of the sort that would take a couple of minutes, thus resulting in a civil servant using an old dump with all the data intact, burning it to CDs and then unfortunately ending up with another stupid outsourcing partner (that is, TNT) losing them. Oh, what a surprise. It’s not like EDS haven’t ripped any British government agencies off before… (They even have occasional problems doing corporate IT outsourcing properly.) This failure is exactly the reason why no government IT services should be outsourced under any circumstances: good practice is swamped under charges and contracts.
Unity at Ministry of Truth has the best analysis of the details of the emails so far. Also, b3ta have by far the funniest comment on the issue. Probably more to come.
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 
This is what truly worries me about govt outsourcing. I work in local govt (Oxfordshire), and it’s one of the (Conservative) majority’s stated goals to provide as much private provision of public goods as possible. Scary thought.